There have been many articles about the cost of a security breach. With the emergence of privacy regulations that assign penalties based on a business’ profit, or those that calculate a value for each compromised record, it is possible to calculate the cost of a breach based on those metrics. However, it would seem that these hard numbers are not detailed enough to placate many security professionals.
If you're reading this blog, there's a good chance you're familiar with the topic of data breaches; they regularly make the headlines and cause a lot of extra work for IT, security and other staff in affected companies who battle to identify, contain and eradicate the attack. But while the news stories carry the attack's immediate impact, we're rarely aware of the long-term cost to the organization and its staff, both personal and financial.
Every year Verizon releases the Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), covering some of the biggest trends in data breaches across industries, highlighting the common causes for breaches as well as trendy attack vectors. And every year, when it is released, my inbox is immediately hit with questions from colleagues and customers asking how Netskope can mitigate each of the issues raised. So this year I thought I would share my analysis more widely.
According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach report In 2021, data breach costs rose from $3.86 million to $4.24 million, exhibiting the highest average total cost in the 17-year history of their report. A new report from the Department for Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) has revealed that data breaches have become more costly for medium and large businesses in the UK. The report shows how medium-sized and large firms lost an average of £19,400 in 2021.
In the first six parts of this blog series, we laid the foundation for beginning to work with and manage Active Directory (AD). With the groundwork out of the way, it is now time to explore the relationship between cybersecurity and AD. Taking this series one step further, this blog provides an overview of which design considerations are important in securing your AD infrastructure against potential security breaches.
A few weeks ago, a cybersecurity analyst unexpectedly discovered that he could dump files from the hotel network system where he was staying in Qatar to his own computer using the sync tool (used for file synchronization). Through an HSMX Gateway, he managed to access a welter of sensitive data held on an FTP server used for backup purposes. This included personal information on guests such as their room numbers, emails, and cell phone numbers.
A data breach occurs when sensitive data is copied, transmitted, viewed, stolen, or accessed by an unauthorized individual. For a security incident to constitute a data breach, the exposure of sensitive data must be intentional. The presence of intent differentiates a data breach from a data leak, where exposure is accidental. A data leak occurs when data is accidentally exposed through a vulnerability, such as weak passwords.
Everyone is at risk of a data breach or cyber attack, no matter how small or large a company is. Hackers and cybercriminals come up with new ways every day to steal sensitive information or personal data that they can potentially sell or ransom for money. According to a report published by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), a record number of 1862 data breaches occurred in 2021 in the US.
The attack surface is an organization’s digital exposure that an attacker could exploit to get unauthorized access to a system and extract data or other sensitive information. It could also be used as a point within a chain of attacks. As Organizations increasingly rely on SaaS services and products, the digital attack surface is more than the firewall and network.
