Understanding The Seven Types Of Data Breach

Data is today’s commercial currency.  So, it stands to reason that criminals today will use every means necessary to breach your security in order to access your data.  In order for your organization to be protected from a data breach, you will need a comprehensive understanding of the types of data breaches or attack vectors available to cyber criminals.

Defined simply, according to Wikipedia, a data breach is “the intentional or unintentional release of secure or private/confidential information to an untrusted environment.” The Identity Theft Resource Center tracks seven types of data breach categories:

1. Hacking/Computer Intrusion (includes Phishing, Ransomware/Malware and Skimming): Cyber criminals are getting smarter every day and are constantly using a variety of techniques both new (zero-day) as well as variations on old exploits.
2. Insider Threat: Your employees know the most about where your most sensitive data exists and, in some cases, how it is protected, so they can inflict significant damage if not properly monitored or security protocols put in place.
3. Data on the Move: We live in an increasingly mobile world, so another concern has to be when laptops or flash drives are stolen, or back-up tapes are lost in the mail.
4. Physical Theft: Although having Ethan Hunt fly down an air vent to physically access a secure network is a thing of Hollywood lore, physical theft is in fact a reality. Perhaps, not as dramatic as in film, physical data theft can be as simple as plugging a USB drive into a sensitive.
5. Employee Error/Negligence/Improper Disposal/Lost: People make mistakes all of the time, so it is expected that at some point someone will do something dumb when it comes to data handling.
6. Accidental Web/Internet Exposure: As organization migrate more data to cloud-based applications and infrastructure, the likelihood of accidental exposure increases.
7. Unauthorized Access: This form of data breach is directly attributed to a lack of access controls. Specifically, if admin privileges are poorly monitored or there are no controls of level of privilege within specific applications or even across network resources.

Ignorance is not bliss when it comes to data breaches and just knowing about them is not enough. Informationisbeautiful.net has an amazing dynamic infographic of “World’s Biggest Data Breaches,” which we highly recommend you spend some time with to uncover the cost of the top data breaches from 2004 through present. Recognize that even though organizations knew theses cyber exploits existed didn’t prevent the magnitude of impact.

The one with the biggest impact is breaches via hacking. Identifying any malicious or hidden code within incoming data files whether on your network or in a cloud is now a cyber imperative. What you don’t know or cannot see can harm you. Find a solution that can identify malicious code within any data set and you will be preventing the potential for significant harm.

For your cyber data breach protection, we suggest a static evaluation technology which is faster, more accurate, not OS version dependent and covers 100 percent of code, with complete visibility.  If you think you need a software to help you manage and secure your data, then consider Couchbase. Having such a solution will place your organization in a consistent “prevent, don’t remediate” mode which, ultimately, will keep your organization secure and unnecessarily paying hefty recovery costs.

Read more: Inside the SEC’s Statement on Cybersecurity