Recent findings report that on average, 96 percent of systems across all industry segments have been breached. While you should absolutely update your information security system and protocols to provide the best protection you can for your data, you should also know how to spot a data breach. Unfortunately the odds of escaping one aren’t in your favor, but you can increase your chances of spotting a breach quickly and containing any damage.

67% of small and micro businesses have experienced a cyber attack, while 58% have experienced a data breach within the last 12 months, according to a study conducted by the Ponemon Institute. Cybersecurity has become one of the major questions that plague the 21st century, with numerous businesses reporting significant losses resulting from loss of private customer data, denial of service (DoS) attacks.

During the holiday season people logged on to make purchases through online retailers, like no other time of the year. While there was significant growth in many segments of society on a global scale in 2018, we also saw a significant increase in online retail breaches where personally identifiable information was compromised at an alarming rate.

An estimated 34 percent of companies have experienced data breaches in the last 12 months. With those odds, every organization should be prioritizing cyber security and cyber attack management. Take the time now to put together a data breach incident response plan utilizing these steps, so if your organization is affected, you’ll be able to respond as quickly and effectively as possible. Here are some key steps the plan you create should include.

UpGuard’s researchers regularly uncover and report on corporate data breaches. We often find that the breach is not directly caused by the company, but by one of their third-party vendors. This series of posts is about a less-understood aspect of vendor risk, data breaches by third-party vendors. We will run you through many types of data breaches, how they relate to your third-party vendors, and ultimately what you can do to prevent them from hurting your business.

A series of high-profile data breaches in 2017 made it clear that it's becoming more difficult to protect your and your customer's sensitive information from nefarious agents. As businesses expand, they develop and implement security policies that help protect their sensitive information from outsiders.

There are many different kinds of sensitive data that can be exposed, each with its own particular exploits and consequences. This article will focus on what we have categorized as “systems information,” data that describes digital operations, such as systems inventory, configuration details, data center and cloud design, performance metrics and analyses, application code, and IT business data, such as equipment spend, vendor discount, and budgeting.

Previously we introduced the concept of cloud leaks, and then examined how they happen. Now we’ll take a look at why they matter. To understand the consequences of cloud leaks for the organizations involved, we should first take a close look at exactly what it is that’s being leaked. Then we can examine some of the traditional ways information has been exploited, as well as some new and future threats such data exposures pose.

The insurance industry has been consistently targeted for cyber attacks as of late, for good reason: sensitive data is at the heart of every process—from handling health insurance claims to archiving medical histories. And because medical records are worth ten times more than credit card information on the black market, firms handling said data are required to take extra precautions in bolstering information security.

If many of the recent threat reports are to be believed, we can assume that, on the whole, businesses are not improving when it comes to detecting a network breach. In those isolated cases where improvement can be seen, the improvement is small. The Mandiant M-Trends 2018 report states that the median global dwell time sat at 101 days (in 2017). I can believe that.