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.

Indicators of compromise are the red flags of the information security world. These helpful warnings allow trained professionals to recognize when a system may be under attack or if the attack has already taken place, providing a way to respond to protect information from extraction. There are many indicators of compromise, depending on the type of threat.

Hackers have gained access to the personal data of 50m T-Mobile customers. Cybercriminals are reportedly offering access to some of the data in return for a fee of 6 bitcoin, or $270,000. The cause of the breach is unclear, but this follows a string of breaches for T-Mobile in recent years, after an incident in December 2020 that leaked the call records of around 200,000 customers.