Welcome to DataBreaches.com, an information hub for the latest data protection strategies that can best minimize the risk of a data breach occurring in your home or organization.
Impact of Data Breaches
Data breaches are extremely expensive. Not only is there a tangible cost from restitution expenses like having to pay for lifetime credit monitoring for all individuals with compromised records but there is a huge intangible cost of a loss of trust from customers. The later of these is probably much more significant in that it can compromise the longevity of a business.
Let’s just take a look at some of the tangible costs:
- The total cost of data breaches over the last 5 years is over $150 billion dollars.
- The average cost to organizations reporting data breaches is $5.5 million dollars.
- The average cost per compromised record is $194
Gartner reports that 36% of organizations expect to experience a security breach in the coming year. With numbers like these it is difficult to fathom how large company executives can skimp on IT security budgets. They can pay now to implement proactive information security measures or pay later on these same measures in addition to legal settlements, restitution, and reputation repair services. The executives at TJ Maxx (94 million compromised records) and Sony (77 million compromised records) surely will attest to that. Don’t let what happened to them and hundreds of other companies happen to you and your organization.
Origins of Data Breaches
Contrary to popular belief, the majority of data breaches are not the result of external attacks. Malicious and negligent insider acts now account for the cause of more than half of all data breaches. The trend continues in this direction as is evidenced in recent data security white papers.
Strategy to Minimize Data Breaches
Most organizations have done well to fortify their network perimeter by deploying security infrastructure stalwarts like firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and routers that properly segment internal and external networks. They have been concentrating their defense on the perimeter which for well over a decade the most persistent threat existed. Data protection strategies are now shifting however due to the increasing threats from inside as mentioned above. Companies with the best security postures now provide a high level of security at the object or file level itself. DataBreaches.com sees the ability for individual files to remain protected regardless of their location as becoming the most essential capability for a modern data protection strategy.
DataBreaches.com will share the top strategies corporations and governments are using to secure their most sensitive data in the coming week. Please check back with us soon for white papers, product reviews, and in depth analysis of individual data protection strategies.