Cybercriminals are currently enjoying a golden age. The sudden shift to remote working, combined with the digitization of everyday life, means endless opportunities to compromise systems and access sensitive data. If you don't want your organization to be their next victim, you must have to know how to prevent data breaches.
Table of Contents
- The Cost of a Data Breach
- How Do Data Breaches Happen?
- How Do You Prevent Data Breaches?
- What Should You Do After a Data Breach?
- Integrate.io and ETL Security
The Cost of a Data Breach
The damage a data breach does to a business cannot be understated. A recent study by IBM shows that:
- Companies lose an average of $150 per record in a data breach
- Data breaches involve an average of over 25,000 records
- The average cost of recovering from a data breach is over $8 million for American companies
- It takes 279 days for most companies to identify and rectify breaches
Those are just the tangible figures. You also have to think about how losing customer information can cause reputational damage and how shoddy information security and constant data leaks might create a competitive disadvantage.
Protecting sensitive data is more challenging than ever, especially when so many people are working remotely. But before we talk about how to prevent data breaches, let's first examine how breaches occur.
How Do Data Breaches Happen?
Most data breaches are a mix of high-tech infiltration techniques, manipulation, and luck. Common techniques include:
- Malware: Users can unintentionally install a virus by visiting an infected website or opening an infected email attachment. Malware comes in many forms, such as spyware that silently harvest sensitive data in the background, keystroke loggers that capture passwords, and ransomware that encrypts your entire systems.
- Phishing: Phishing emails look like a genuine request to log in to an online service, such as your bank account. But the link in the email directs users to a counterfeit phishing website, where they enter their login credentials. Once the hackers have the username and password, they can simply log into the real site.
- Insider attack: Rogue employees and contractors can steal data and sell it to hackers. Cybercriminals can also simply walk into an office and access a terminal if that office lacks adequate physical security measures. Never underestimate the damage that simple human error can cause.
- Man-in-the-middle: Hackers have scams that allow them to intercept data as it moves between points. For example, a criminal might sit in a café and create a public wi-fi hotspot with a name like COFFEE_SHOP_PUBLIC_WIFI. If anyone connects to this network, the hacker can capture their data.
- Lost or stolen device: Employees often carry laptops and USB drives with sensitive data, especially when working remotely. These devices can fall into the wrong hands, either through loss or theft.
- Social engineering: Hackers can use manipulation techniques to trick people into granting systems access. This technique is even easier in the age of social media. Look at anyone's feed, and you can find dozens of password clues, such as birthdays, favorite sports teams, and the names of children or pets.
How Do You Prevent Data Breaches?
If you want to understand data breach prevention, you first have to think like a hacker. That means looking at the whole of your infrastructure, including your users, and trying to identify weak points in your data security strategy. Here are seven essential steps to help protect your sensitive data.
1) Train Your Employees to Recognize Phishing Emails
An international study by Interpol shows that phishing attacks increased by 59% during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. These attacks are becoming more sophisticated, and even tech-savvy users can fall for a well-crafted phishing email.
If your employees don't know how to recognize common signs of phishing attacks, then any cybercriminal could gain access to your data. After all, it only takes one person to compromise an entire system.
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