Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

Just this week, the news broke that a poorly-secured AWS server exposed over 10 million hotel reservation logs from Cloud Hospitality websites, putting the information of millions of guests at risk. As of June 2020, more than 3.2 million consumer records have been exposed in the ten biggest data breaches this year. Organizations in virtually every industry struggle to get data loss prevention (DLP) right due to one big misconception about this important cybersecurity practice.

An undisclosed number of customers of outdoor clothing retailer The North Face have had their passwords reset by the company, following a credential-stuffing attack. The company has revealed that on October 9, 2020, it became aware that hackers had used usernames and passwords stolen from a third-party website to gain unauthorised access to customer accounts.

According to the 2019 Cost of Data Breach Report from Ponemon Institute and IBM Security, the global average cost of a data breach has grown by 12 percent in the last five years to $3.92 million. This was driven by the multi-year financial impact of breaches, increased regulation and the difficult process of resolving cyber attacks.

American bookselling giant Barnes & Noble is contacting customers via email, warning them that its network was breached by hackers, and that sensitive information about shoppers may have been accessed. In the email to customers, Barnes & Noble says that it became aware that it had fallen victim to a cybersecurity attack on Saturday October 10th.

A number of high-profile data breaches have resulted directly from misconfigured permissions or unpatched vulnerabilities. For instance, the 2017 Equifax breach was the result of exploiting an unpatched flaw in Apache Struts allowing remote code execution. More recently, the Capital One breach last year stemmed from a misconfigured web application firewall. Verizon’s 2020 DBIR reported that only hacking was more prevalent than misconfiguration errors as the culprit of data breaches.

It seems like every day there’s a new incident of customer data exposure. Credit card and bank account numbers; medical records; personally identifiable information (PII) such as address, phone number, or SSN— just about every aspect of social interaction has an informational counterpart, and the social access this information provides to third parties gives many people the feeling that their privacy has been severely violated when it’s exposed.

As of June 2020, more than 3.2 million consumer records were exposed in the 10 biggest data breaches this year. Eight of the ten largest breaches occurred at healthcare or medical organizations, meaning patient information in addition to PII was likely acquired by hackers. Data loss prevention (DLP) is an ever-changing practice, with new security policies and information security standards evolving to keep up with the threat of online hackers.

Not too long ago, the desktop computer was the primary computing device for enterprise employees. With the rise of mobile endpoints like smartphones, laptops and tablets, employees are connecting to corporate networks from a wide variety of places and devices. Today, especially with the popularity of the WFH (work from home) model, managing the multitude of mobile devices is more complicated than ever before. The statistics tell a sobering tale.

The 2020 Cost of Data Breach report from IBM and the Ponemon is out. It provides a detailed analysis of causes, costs and controls that appeared in their sampling of data breaches. The report is full of data, and the website allows you to interact with its information so that you can do your own analysis and/or dig into aspects relevant to you and your industry.