Tsippi Dach explores some notable breaches caused by mis configuration s and how organizations can avoid becoming the next big headline.

Organizations often have their confidential information illicitly for sale on the darknets, but they don’t know it. Statistically, over 75% of compromised credentials are reported to the victim organization by law enforcement when it has become too late. That’s why dark web monitoring tools providers are the appropriate solution to help you know on time when your credentials are stolen and exposed on the dark web.

As Data Privacy Day once again rolls around, we can look back at some healthy improvements when it comes to privacy that organizations made over the previous 12 months. We can also use this yearly reminder on such an important topic to look forward to the coming year to pinpoint where additional changes are needed.

The number of U.S. data breaches reported in 2021 increased dramatically over the preceding year. As reported by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC), there were 1,291 data breaches between January 1, 2021 and September 30, 2021. The volume beat out the 1,108 breaches detected over the course of Full Year (FY) 2020. It’s therefore not surprising that data compromises year-to-date (YTD) was up 27% last year compared to FY 2020.

On June 23, 2021, threat actors reported that they had stolen a terabyte of data from Saudi Aramco, a state-owned oil company in Saudi Arabia. The threat actors released samples of data they had procured after redacting critical information. They also claimed to have detailed information on Aramco’s employees, such as their full names, photographs, passport scans, emails, phone numbers, residence permit (Iqama card) numbers, job titles, employee ID numbers, and family information.

It should come as little surprise that when enterprise and IT leaders turned their attention to the cloud, so did attackers. Unfortunately, the security capabilities of enterprises have not always kept up with the threat landscape. Poor visibility, management challenges and misconfigurations combine with other security and compliance issues to make protecting cloud environments a complex endeavor.

This past year was a banner year for cybercriminals. By the end of September, the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITCR) reported that the number of breaches that had taken place over the first three quarters of 2021 had exceeded the total number of breaches in 2020.

The pharmaceutical company Pfizer recently acknowledged that thousands of internal documents were leaked, including trade secrets related to its COVID-19 vaccine. In a California lawsuit, Pfizer stated that a former employee had exfiltrated sensitive data to their personal cloud accounts and devices while they were still working there.

Some of the most damaging data leaks have resulted from poor database security. In March 2020, 10.88 billion records were stolen from adult video streaming website CAM4’s cloud storage servers. In March 2018, 1.1 billion people were the victim of a breach of the world’s largest biometric database, Aadhaar. And, in April 2021, 533 million users had their information compromised when a Facebook database was leaked on the dark web for free.

Cybercriminals are continuously finding new ways to steal sensitive information. Having robust network security measures in place is now more important than ever — and network authentication is part of the solution. There are various authentication technologies available that can add an extra layer of protection to prevent security lapses, and each one offers a unique solution. This post will highlight the most common methods for network authentication and answer the following questions.