What is Data Breach?
Stealing of data from organizations is called data breach. Any organization, small, medium or large may suffer from a data breach. Stolen data involves personal information, accounting information, and other confidential data.
Organizations suffer damage to their reputation. Organizations also suffer from financial damage. Financial damages also occur to their customers as well as employees. Employees and customer face financial losses due to their stolen personal information.
Causes of Data Breach
- Malware
Criminals often deploy malware onto the system. Malware then sends information to the criminals.
Protection: Keep a good security software installed on your system.
- Insider Attack
It is often seen that an employee is behind data breach. Employee steal the data from the organization and then pass it on to the criminals.
Protection: Keep check of your employees and provide limited access to the resources.
- Social Engineering
Criminals often try to manipulate users to provide their information by posing as a genuine organization or provide users with the fake deals that are too good to believe.
Protection: Do not fall for the deals and offers that are too good to be true.
- Vulnerabilities
Criminals use security holes present in applications and firewall to enter into a system and steal data.
Protection: Keep all the software and application updated.
- Using of Weak Credentials
Users often use weak and common passwords for their different accounts. This will make task easier for the criminals.
Protection: Use complex passwords and never share with any one.
- Permissions
Criminals take advantages of the permissions given to their employees and their systems. Administrators sometime give less permission and sometimes they give too many permissions, which leads to creation of the loopholes in the system which criminals can take advantage off.
Protection: Give only necessary permissions and do not complicate it.
- Loss or Theft of Devices Containing Important Data
Data breach also happens when a device containing precious data is lost or gets stolen by the criminals. Criminals extract information from these devices and use it for malicious purpose.
Protection: Keep a check of your devices and always keep data on them encrypted.
Notable Data Breaches
2016 Data breaches
Verizon Enterprise Services
The breach on Verizon Enterprise Services allowed hackers to steal information of around 1.5 million customer records.
Office of Child Support Enforcement
From the Office of Child Support Enforcement laptops and storages devices have been stolen containing personal information. Around 5 million individuals are affected by it.
LinkedIn and Myspace.
Group of hackers called Peace, stole data of 167 million users of LinkedIn and data of 360 million Myspace users.
2017 Data breaches
Equifax
Around, 145,500,000 consumer records were stolen leading it to become the largest data breach in history.
United States and South Korea Classified Military Documents
South Korea claimed that North Korean hackers’ stole over 235 gigabytes of military documents. These were stolen from the Defense Integrated Data Center.
Paradise Papers
These papers contain all the information about offshore finance of politicians, celebrities, high-end taxpayers, and other individuals. Around 13.4 million documents are stolen.
2018 Data Breach
Bell Canada
Data breach resulted in 1.9 million active email addresses stolen with about 1,700 customer names and phone numbers.
Data breaches are becoming more common now days. Every year organizations and their customer suffer major loss. Organizations around countries face billions of dollars in loss.
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