What is a Data Breach and Ways to Prevent It?

Quick Summary: Want to know what a data breach is and how it can impact your organization? This blog will help you understand what a data breach is and how it occurs in the simplest way possible. Get a complete understanding with examples of real-world cases. You can also read the tips on preventing it to safeguard your data. Keep reading for more!

Today, data is critical for every organization and as valuable as gold. It plays an important role in all aspects of the business including decision-making, operational efficiency, and employee management. However, with the growing threats of cyber incidents, securing your data is a hard nut to crack.

Data breaches occur when your confidential information is leaked. Plus, the data is available to a third party that you have not permitted to access it. Isn’t it frightening? Your business-critical information is in the hands of someone you don’t know and trust.

There are many drastic consequences of this situation when your data is exposed like you can lose your business secrets. Preventing data breaches is the best measure to protect your data. You can start by identifying weaknesses in your existing systems or applications to fortify the digital landscape.

The use of a vulnerability scanner can help you uncover potential weaknesses. Besides this, you can also follow the best practices for security like strong passwords and encryption to mitigate risks.

Let’s learn more about data breaches and ways to prevent them in this blog.

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What is a Data Breach?

A data breach is the unintentional or intentional exposure of sensitive information to an unauthorized party. So, data breaches occur when confidential data is leaked due to a cyberattack, or an insider accidentally or purposely reveals the information.

With a successful data breach, an unauthorized party like a hacker would gain access to the data they are not permitted to for financial benefits or to fulfill their malicious objectives.

A short, sweet, and simple definition of a data breach would be to accidentally reveal your personal information to someone you don’t intend to.

Let’s understand it with an example. Suppose a company ‘X’ with a database of millions of users that consists of their names, physical addresses, phone numbers, and emails.

A hacker has found a critical vulnerability in the company’s systems that allow access to the database. The hacker would bypass the security controls and access the crucial information of the company’s customers by exploiting the vulnerability.

If you think data breaches can majorly happen due to external factors like cyberattacks, you should learn from Tesla’s data breach incident last year. After the investigation, it was found that former employees shared data of over 75,000 Tesla employees with a foreign media outlet.

Just search “data breach” on Google and hit the news tab, and you will find countless reports of data breaches.

Some Notable Examples of Data Breaches

Many organizations around the world have suffered security breaches to date resulting in compromised data. Even organizations with great reputations have gone through this situation. Below are a few examples of such organizations that have faced data breaches in the past.

• Yahoo!: Yahoo faced one of the biggest data breaches in history that compromised the personal information and passwords of users. Billions of users were affected by this incident. The breach was reported in 2016.
• Microsoft: In 2021, the Microsoft Exchange email server was attacked by hackers who provided access to around 60,000 emails of companies.
• Global Affairs Canada: Recently in 2023, hackers breached the security of Global Affairs Canada’s VPN resulting in accessing the personal information of users and employees. The hackers got access to personal information such as emails and contacts with this attack.

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Why Does Data Get Leaked?

Data is the most valuable asset for every organization, and it can be used to do significant damage when in the wrong hands. Hence, it can be disastrous for your business if your data is leaked. But how do data breaches happen and what can you do? There are many factors that cause data breaches. Let’s check out these factors below.

Internal Factors

In many cases, sensitive data of a company is leaked by an insider or employee. There are many people in a company who have access to confidential information. This information can be traded with competitors or used for malicious purposes. Let’s check the different reasons for leaking data due to internal factors.

• Accidental disclosure: Data can be exposed when an employee accidentally puts it into a place where it’s available in the public domain. It is not motivated by malicious intent but occurs due to ignorance or coordination gaps.
• Weak security measures: Another reason for data exposure is the weak security measures used in an organization. For example, lack of encryption, endpoint security, and vulnerabilities allow attackers to easily breach system security and steal data.
• Human error: Human error is the biggest reason for cyber incidents and it’s hard to identify. Often weak passwords, outdated software, and misconfigurations that arise due to poor security practices and human error cause severe damage to organizations.
• Social engineering: It is a kind of attacking tactic that bad actors use to trick victims into exposing sensitive information through dubious emails and malicious links. When an employee opens a mail or clicks a link that is infected with malware it affects the target system. It includes phishing attacks.

Internal factors can be more dangerous than external factors because they have easier access to an organization’s critical resources. However, you can follow the best security practices and adopt a zero-trust architecture to build a robust security posture.

External Factors

Usually, organizations have a large attack surface due to various devices, systems, and applications that serve as points of access to their data. Hackers attempt to penetrate an organization’s system by exploiting unsecured or vulnerable points of access. They seek vulnerabilities like OWASP Top 10 that allow them to breach security.

Cyberattacks are included in the external factor. A cyberattack is a deliberate attempt to breach the security of a victim’s system by exploiting common vulnerabilities. Vulnerabilities are the major reason behind cyberattacks that attackers exploit to gain unauthorized access to the target system or application.

Cross-site Scripting, DDoS, CSRF, and SQL injection attacks are a few examples of cyberattacks occurring due to vulnerabilities. These types of attacks are among the major causes of data breaches. Identifying and resolving vulnerabilities on time is the best way to mitigate these security risks.

You need a comprehensive vulnerability scanning to uncover potential system or application weaknesses to prevent cyberattacks. By detecting and removing vulnerabilities, you can make your systems and applications hack-proof.

Should You Care About Data Breaches?

Why not? A single incident of data breach will cost you the reputation you have earned to date and incur heavy financial penalties and losses. Besides, data breaches can expose your data to a bad actor who can either sell it on the dark web or exploit it for a bigger attack.

Bad actors can use your data to commit crimes with deepfakes, steal your identity, blackmail you, and get involved in other nefarious activities. The following are the risks of data breaches.

Damaged Reputation

Your customers trust you, that’s why they are using your applications. In case of a data breach, their trust will be gone, and it will be hard to gain that confidence again. As a result, it will destroy your reputation affecting your market value, profit, and future growth. Not only will it be hard to gain new customers, but retaining the existing ones will be a bigger challenge.

Regulatory Actions

Organizations must comply with many data protection standards and laws such as HIPAA, CCPA, PCI DSS, GDPR, SOC2, ISO, and more. HIPAA and PCI DSS are specifically important for organizations operating in the financial and healthcare sectors.

These regulations and standards are important to ensure the data protection of an organization’s customers. Many of these regulations require strict penalties in case of a data breach. For example, under the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) law, organizations have to pay up to 4% of their annual turnover in case of a data breach.

Financial Loss

Data breaches can cost significantly to your organization and cause heavy financial loss. Indeed, IBM’s report on data breaches states that the average cost (global) of a data breach is 4.88 million USD. This shows that organizations are losing millions of dollars every year due to exposed data.

What Can You Do to Prevent Data Breaches?

As cybersecurity risks are increasing and becoming more complex, securing your data has become even more challenging. You need a holistic approach to protect your data with the right tools, practices, and thorough vulnerability assessment. The following are some tips to follow to prevent data breaches.

Adopt a Zero-Trust Architecture

Zero-Trust architecture provides a different outlook on security measures. Instead of completely relying on security controls and defenses, it focuses more on the users, resources, and assets. In essence, it follows the “no trust, always verify” policy ensuring stronger authentication for every stage of digital interactions.

So, there are multiple layers of security and users with different roles strictly authenticated for every interaction with the systems and applications. It restricts access with strict access controls and never trusts any user.

Regularly Check for Vulnerabilities

You can significantly mitigate security risks for your digital infrastructure by regularly checking your web applications and APIs for vulnerabilities. DAST or Dynamic Application Security Testing is a testing method that automates vulnerability scanning to identify critical weaknesses. It dynamically performs security testing and checks for vulnerabilities with simulated attacks like a real attacker. You can use it for web app security testing and find common weaknesses to enhance its security.

Follow Best Security Practices

The best approach to ensure system and application security is by adhering to standards and following the right security practices. Use encryption, strong passwords, and multi-factor authentication as well as ensure that systems and software are always updated.

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In Conclusion

There are many ways that you can use to prevent data breaches and one of them is to discover and fix security vulnerabilities. You can leverage a DAST scanner like ZeroThreat to find vulnerabilities before hackers do and prevent potential cyber-attacks.

ZeroThreat offers next-gen DAST features, and it can identify known and hard-to-detect vulnerabilities. It can discover complex vulnerabilities like zero-day, 1-day, N-day, and out-of-band, as well as emerging vulnerabilities. You can take advantage of an AI-powered scanning engine and detect weaknesses most accurately with zero false positives.

Try ZeroThreat for absolutely free and see the magic yourself. It is designed to meet the needs of modern AppSec teams and seamlessly integrates into SDLC.