Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

There’s an old saying that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity.” Unfortunately, this doesn’t ring true when it comes to data breaches and ransomware attacks. High profile security incidents continue to make headlines, and those headlines are impacting bottom lines. In response to these, the US federal government is modernizing its own cybersecurity infrastructure, and more state governments are implementing laws to protect citizens.

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Act is a broad set of data privacy rules that define how an organization must handle and protect the personal data of citizens of the European Union (EU). The Regulation also outlines the way that organizations can report a data breach. Articles 33 and 34 outline the requirements for breach notification; however, most businesses are still unaware of their responsibilities.

Data breaches are now part of doing business, with many companies having been affected. Data is very valuable to criminals because it is often used to commit fraudulent activities as well as to enhance the credibility of scams. Data that is stolen ranges from Social Security Numbers (SSNs) to other identification documents and payment details.

IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2021 analyzed 537 real breaches and conducted nearly 3,500 interviews to uncover the true cost of a data breach in 2020. The publication covers initial attack vectors, how long it took organizations to discover and contain braces, as well as the effects that incident response efforts and artificial intelligence have on mitigating breach costs.

Every breach starts as a compromise that goes unnoticed and unactioned, often because existing security devices have too many events, too little context and cannot prioritize. Providing these systems with threat intelligence is the lowest cost and most effective way to improve contextualization and blocking of new attacks.