Imagine one day you wake up and receive an e mail telling everything about you? Does it sound scary?In today`s world we almost share everything in digital world even if we think that everything is encrypted. But is it safe enough not to be breached?My topic of the week is about “data breach.” To briefly describe, data breach means any security incident that leads to unauthorised parties to access sensitive information such as PII (Personally Identifiable Information), health information, phone number, insurance number and so on!Data breach may come to our lives in different ways such as phishing attacks (usually deceptive e mails or messages to trick people), insider threats, physical breaches and so on!But wait !! why does it happen?Did you know the most data breach happen because of weak security measures and human error?Data breach can happen as easy as clicking a link by mistake or falling a phishing attempt. That happens when employees are not trained or lack of knowledge in public.Let’s list some of the biggest data breaches and their cost.You are probably familiar with Yahoo! If you like surfing online. The time was showing between 2013-2014 and a significant data breach occurred. Attackers gained access to names, passwords, secret answers of 3 billion user credentials by unauthorised access. That breach costed Yahoo! a massive bill and loosing -$350 million their market worth.Now! let’s talk about some of the consequences of a data breach for both the company and the client and the public.Data breaches sometimes can cause longer ranging consequences depends on who are the actors and the company or organisation. It may spread rapidly and impact everyone on organisation and clients even their contacts.Let’s list some of the consequences.- If a data breach occurred organisation may need to shut down the system and that can cause a downtime and interruption. Clients will not be able to access their service.- Depending on how big data breaches, organisation may need to do remediation on their system and that can cost a massive bill and if organisation go to bankruptcy, clients may not be able to get any paid service.- Every data breach comes with its consequences. Some of the data breach happen because organisations sometimes don’t meet the regulatory standards. If there are not any security measures which meet these standards, companies can get fines and penalties. This consequence may result in impact on customer trust.Today we spoke about Data Breach and the impact it can make. Test and assessments the system, encryption layer, patching and updates, back up strategies and asking for help are recommended to reduce this impact.See you next week to speak about another topic! 😊
