Those interested in how data breaches occur should be familiar with the general topography of the Internet. In our previous piece, we discussed the difference between the surface web, deep web and dark web. Most estimates about the topography of the Internet conclude that the deep web makes up between 95%-99% of all web sites. The dark web likely comprises less than 1%, while the surface web accounts for only a few percentage points itself. Nearly the entire Internet is the deep web.

According to the Cisco 2018 Asia Pacific Security Capabilities Benchmark Study, 90 percent of Australian companies report that they receive up to 5,000 cyberthreats per day. For cybercriminals, Australia’s superannuation funds, banks, and insurers make for attractive targets. It is essential that these industries can protect and secure their data, including the data of their clients and customers, and respond quickly and robustly if a critical cyber-attack occurs.

Most descriptions of the Internet contain three layers, or levels: the surface web, the deep web, and the dark web. These categorizations can be both useful and misleading. The words “deep” and “dark” carry connotations with them that often obscure the technical and logical reasons for their designation.

UpGuard CyberRisk enables organizations to control and monitor third-party vendor risk in real-time and improve their security posture. Since we launched CyberRisk, our team has been speaking to users and evolved the platform into two new modules, BreachSight and VendorRisk. Combined with a redesigned user experience, UpGuard is easier to use than ever.

Amazon S3, one of the leading cloud storage solutions, is used by companies all over the world to power their IT operations. Over four years, UpGuard has detected thousands of S3-related data breaches caused by the incorrect configuration of S3 security settings. Jeff Barr, Chief Evangelist for Amazon Web Services recently announced public access settings for S3 buckets, a new feature designed to help AWS customers stop the epidemic of data breaches caused by incorrect S3 security settings.

Your primary systems aren’t the only source of damaging exposed credentials. Third-party applications employed by your organization also have privileged logins that must be protected. Cloud platforms, software as a service (SaaS), and local third party applications such as ERP systems often have administrative logins with full control.

UpGuard’s researchers regularly uncover and report on corporate data breaches. We often find that the breach is not directly caused by the company, but by one of their third-party vendors. This series of posts is about a less-understood aspect of vendor risk, data breaches by third-party vendors. We will run you through many types of data breaches, how they relate to your third-party vendors, and ultimately what you can do to prevent them from hurting your business.

To deliver technology products and services, companies use multiple technology environments so that changes, updates, and testing can be completed in a controlled way without interrupting customer experience. This is a best practice approach that maintains high levels of system stability, uptime and security. These “non-production”, or test environments should ideally be completely disconnected from production environments to prevent security incidents and bugs.

The most well-known type of system credential is the administrative, or root password. These types of accounts are “administrators,” meaning they usually have total access to whatever system they are for. Administrator accounts are used by your IT staff or contractors to manage the basic operations of a system. These operational tasks could include maintenance, data migrations, and other common IT work that requires elevated access beyond normal business use.

Even as public awareness of data breaches grows, the popular conception of what information is sensitive, and how sensitive it is, lags behind the threats that individuals, businesses, and governments face today. The classic model for a data breach is individuals’ login credentials for banking or private identity information like their social security numbers, but there is equal– and in many cases far greater– value in information with less obvious potential for abuse.