The recent slate of breaches and regulatory actions has prompted many companies who had been doing the minimum in terms of proactive cyber risk management to rethink their approach. In the U.S., new regulations are emerging (for states like Virginia, Colorado, Massachusetts and many others), and existing regulators are increasing their enforcement, as we’ve seen by the NY Dept of Financial Services (NYDFS) and the SEC.

Data breaches in Australia are on the rise, particularly in the financial and healthcare industries. In an effort to DISRUPT this pernicious trend, the Australian government is revising its cybersecurity frameworks and policies to strengthen resilience against nation-state threat actors. But Australian businesses cannot solely rely on the government's cybersecurity initiatives. Even the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) admits that proposed security frameworks only raise the baseline of security.

These days, it’s not a matter if your password will be breached but when. Major websites experience massive data breaches at an alarming rate. Have I Been Pwned currently has records from 543 sites comprising 11.4 billion accounts. This includes well-known names like Wattpad, MySpace, and Facebook. This is an 84% increase in the number of sites and a 115% increase in the number of accounts from when I published the first version of this article in 2018.

Data breaches are costing organizations millions of dollars on average. In its 2020 Cost of a Data Breach Report, IBM found that a data breach cost the average organization $3.86 million. This price tag was even greater for organizations located in the United States and operating in the healthcare industry at $8.64 million and $7.13 million, respectively. What’s behind this price tag, you ask?

Industries most impacted in 2019 continued to be hard hit in both 2020 and so far in 2021, including healthcare, education and financial services. However, the greatest percentage increases occurred in industries that had been generally spared in 2019. The overall implication is that data attacks became broader and deeper during the pandemic, a trend that continues during the recovery.

A data breach is defined as the unauthorized access to sensitive information about a person – whether it's their personal, financial information, passwords, credit card numbers, social security number, and other sensitive information. It is one of the most costly and damaging issues that can plague any person and company. Unfortunately, it has become a far too common occurrence these days as hackers constantly find ways to break even the most complicated security measures.

The escalation in cybersecurity breaches as seen in 2020 has continued well into 2021. According to Verizon’s 2021 DBIR , so far they have looked into 29,207 incidents worldwide. These incidents boiled down to 5,258 confirmed data breaches. An analysis of these breaches shows: Many of these breaches were financially motivated, targeting sensitive data that can be easily monetized and lucratively too. Human negligence, consistent with previous years, was the biggest threat to security.

Businesses in Singapore face mounting challenges to protect customer data as a result of the newly enacted Personal Data Protection (Amendment) Bill (PDPA). With higher penalties expected to be levied from February 2022, it’s imperative that enterprises, particularly those collecting customer data, have a solid information security framework and incident response plan in place.

In today’s world, data breaches are a fact of life for both consumers and companies. It’s become somewhat of a truism to point out that for many companies breaches are a matter of if not when as defenders are at a significant disadvantage.