In this highly technology-driven world, no company is completely safe from cyber-attacks. Even one of the IT giants – GitHub faced exploitation, leading to the stealing of their Code Signing Certificates. There was only minimal impact on the organization and its software products. But, from the incident, almost every small, medium, and large-scale company has got aware of securing their software publisher certificates.

The names of over 1.5 million individuals were published on the dark web in January after ahacker gained access to the TSA’s “No Fly List.” That’s a lot of names (including aliases and birth dates), so why wasn’t the list secure, and how did it get leaked? The entire breach came down to one small business with one misconfigured server.

Data breaches are on the rise and they can be both unexpected and costly. The average estimated cost of a data breach has peaked at an all-time high—an astounding $4.35 million, according to a 2022 report by IBM and the Ponemon Institute. Poor password hygiene and legacy software are two key culprits that will increase your chances of falling victim to a password breach.

When news of the recent CircleCI breach broke, developers everywhere scrambled to rotate tokens and remove hardcoded secrets stored in the popular CI/CD platform to minimize their exposure. Now that the dust has settled and more details are available, we’re reexamining the CircleCI attack chain to highlight the importance of a holistic Identity Security strategy in thwarting future damaging attacks.

Data breaches exposed at least 42 million records between March 2021 and February 2022. With the increasing risks associated with the cyber world, this comes as no surprise.

Read also: Financial firm ION hit with a cyber-attack, Hive ransomware disrupted in a global cyber operation, and more.

According to a report released by IBM and Ponemon, the healthcare sector has the highest rates of security breaches and cyber attacks globally. The average cost of a data breach for healthcare organizations is around $10.1 million, while the global average for all industries sits around less than half of that amount, at about $4.35 million.

It would be big news, to say the least, if a large quantity of Google source code found its way into the public domain. Now imagine if the leak also included source code from Amazon and Uber. That’s the scale of the data leak that hit Russian tech giant Yandex. The risk here is that malicious actors could analyze the leaked code and discover exploitable security gaps.

Security teams need to continually bolster their cybersecurity controls and expertise to keep up with the evolving threat landscape. Successful readiness and response to a cybersecurity breach requires the right mix of people, processes and technology. Yet challenges with staffing, technical issues, and budget hamper threat detection and response for too many organizations, creating gaps that threat actors are eager to exploit.

Data breaches have become an unfortunate reality of the digital world we live in. While there is no doubt that efforts can be made to mitigate the chances of a data breach, living in a completely data breach-free world is not realistic. Apart from having processes and technology in place to prevent data breaches, companies should also have a plan of action in case they do suffer a breach. One aspect of being prepared is understanding how vulnerable your industry may be to data breaches.