Data breaches have proved to be one of the most persistent forms of cyberattacks in the past few years.

In 2023, the global average cost of a data breach was reported to be $4.45 million.

That’s a 15% increase over 3 years.

How do you prevent a data breach, then?

Every week, new businesses make it to the headlines, falling victim to data breaches.

Some of them barely recover from the reputation damage, while others never do.

Without strong and sufficient security controls in place, it’s only a matter of time before your business becomes another costly data breach statistic.

In this article, we’ll discuss the fundamentals of data breaches, how they happen, how you should respond to a data breach, as well as some effective tips on how to prevent a data breach.

What is a Data Breach?

A data breach is a security incident where malicious actors gain access to sensitive information and copy, transmit, or steal without authorization.

Data breaches are most common in industries that deal with a massive amount of personal data, such as the financial sector or healthcare industry.

However, with more organizations shifting to digital solutions, and increased connections between businesses, their vendors, and customers, almost every modern organization is now a potential data breach target.

And it’s not just businesses that should be worried about data breaches. Cybercriminals can target anyone they can extract personal data from, as every personal or confidential piece of data is valuable to them as long as someone is willing to pay for it.

How Do Data Breaches Happen?

A data breach happens when an unauthorized party gains access to critical data of a person or an organization. A data breach can take place in many different ways, including:

• Stolen or lost equipment: A lost computer, laptop, portable storage device, or smartphone containing confidential data can lead to a data breach if it ends up in the wrong hands.
• Third-party vendor breaches: Cyber criminals would sometimes target third-party vendors with access to an organization’s systems, instead of directly targeting the organization’s network. Since most vendors tend to have less secure cybersecurity standards than most high-value targets, targeting third-party vendors allows hackers to infiltrate their victims faster and with less effort.
• Stolen credentials: One of the most common ways attackers gain access to critical data is by using someone’s login credentials to sign into services. Cybercriminals use several strategies, like brute force attacks, to get their hands on people’s login credentials.
• Social engineering: Social engineering uses psychological manipulation to trick people into giving up their sensitive personal information. For example, a hacker can pose as a government official and call their targets on the phone to convince them to share their bank account information.
• Vulnerability exploits: Modern organizations use a wide range of different software products to make their tasks easier. However, owing to their complexity, these software applications often contain flaws, also known as "vulnerabilities.”. Cybercriminals exploit these vulnerabilities to gain unauthorized access to confidential information and view, copy, or damage it.
• Insider threats: Sometimes, the threat doesn’t come from the outside, but from the inside of an organization. Insider threats involve people who have access to confidential information who deliberately or mistakenly expose confidential information.
• Malware infections: Sometimes attackers would inject malicious software programs into an organization’s network to breach data. These malicious programs are designed to steal data, monitor user activities, and send information they collect to a server controlled by the attackers.
• Point-of-sale attacks: Some attacks target credit and debit card information, involving the devices that scan and read these cards. As an example, criminals would set up fake ATMs or install separate scanners on a legitimate ATM to gather card numbers and PINs.
• Misconfigured web app or server: Some websites, applications, or web servers lack proper setup, allowing anyone to access their data. This can expose confidential data to anyone who may accidentally stumble upon it, including attackers who are purposefully looking for it. Lack of encryption also allows anyone to access sensitive data by monitoring transmissions between the user and the website.
• Credential stuffing: Cybercriminals use login credentials exposed in a data breach to gain access to other platforms. That’s why it’s recommended to use different combinations of usernames and passwords on multiple services. Otherwise, an attacker will easily gain access to the victim’s email, social media, and/or other online banking accounts.

What Can Attackers Do With Breached Data?

Cybercriminals target organizations to extract high-value data, such as corporate confidential information or personally identifiable information (PII), and sell it for financial gain, causing harm to the individual or organization. And with the advancement of technology, cybercriminals and their methods are becoming more and more sophisticated.

The effects of a data breach can be massively damaging. It can lead to organizations losing their data, which can include sensitive financial information or corporate secrets, but they may also face severe fines, financial penalties, and reputational damage, which can be irreparable.

Attacks on government facilities can result in highly confidential information, such as military operations, political dealings, and national infrastructure details, being exposed to enemy states, which can threaten the government and its citizens.

Individuals suffering from data breaches may lose their personal data, such as banking information, healthcare data, social security numbers, etc., which can lead to identity theft, losing access to their social accounts, impacting their credit scores, monetary loss, and even the risk of facing legal troubles.

5 Tips to Respond to a Data Breach

More than 4100 data breaches were publicly reported in 2022 alone. This means the actual number of data breaches is much higher. It’s only a matter of time before your organization faces a data breach as well.

Here are 5 effective steps you can take in case you face a data breach:

Plug The Gap Where The Breach Took Place

If you detect a data breach in your home or organization, the first step you should take is to confirm the breach is taking place within your system.

An average data breach detection can take at least a few months on average. By the time the problem gets spotted, most people lose all of their personal data to the attack.

By the time you have detected the data breach event, there’s a high possibility that the breach has been taking place for a long time now, and will only get worse with time.

It’s crucial that you take steps to stop the problem right there and then, shut down every part of the network that you think is affected, as well as any compromised users that might have been used to steal your data.

Assess The Damage

After stopping the breach in progress, it’s time to start taking forensic tests to measure the damage caused by the attack. You should check how your data was accessed, as well as analyze the impact it will have when your data gets leaked to the public.

You need to ask the following questions to assess the situation more accurately:

• What was the method of the attack?
• Was social engineering involved in the attack?
• How sensitive is the data that has been breached and stolen?
• Does the data contain high-risk information?
• Does the data have an active backup that you can restore?

The analysis will help you get a better understanding of the situation. Proceeding with performing the analysis will leave the response to the breach incomplete. When taking care of a data breach on behalf of a customer, not performing proper research will make you come off as dishonest.

Notify Those Affected

As a business owner, you may think that covering up the data breach and acting like everything’s fine is a reasonable move to make. And we can’t blame you for thinking that way. However, believe us when we say that it’s not the right move to make.

It can be easy to hide the details, or outright lie about the breach taking place, which is nothing more than a false rumor. But here’s the thing, if you’re upfront about the breach, and let your customers know about it from the start, it’ll cause way less damage to your reputation than the customers finding it out from another source later.

In today’s digital landscape, customers understand that no company can provide a 100% secure environment for online business. If you are completely transparent about your shortcomings and vulnerabilities, and constantly push toward improvement, you’ll get better responses from your customers.

Also, when you’re completely transparent about the proceedings of any data breach incident, you can defend yourself legally, and deal with any negative comments that pop up online about the integrity of your organization.

Perform A Security Audit

After notifying the appropriate authorities and stakeholders, it’s time for you to focus all your assets on a security audit of your organization. Every organization should perform periodic security audits regularly to detect any vulnerabilities or unauthorized access.

The audit performed right after a data breach event checks for two factors:

• How the hacker penetrate the system in the first place
• The fallout of the data breach incident

To resolve the first issue, you should examine the following factors:

• Network And Server Systems
• IP Blocks
• Open Ports
• DNS Records
• Staff Records

After performing the audit, it’s time to determine the amount of data that has actually been stolen or leaked. The severity of the compromised information also plays a major role in the incident. The higher the priority of the information, the more severe the case is.

For example, if the stolen data can be used to identify someone personally, then it’s considered high-value information, and it can be damaging for both an individual and an organization.

Update Your Recovery Plan

Every organization has a recovery plan in case of a major cybersecurity attack. When performing all the steps mentioned above, you should redirect all the steps toward the recovery plan of your organization.

After the breach has been completely dealt with, it’s time to review and update your security policies and recovery plan accordingly.

When you perform a detailed post-breach analysis, you can always turn a data breach or any major cybersecurity incident into a learning opportunity.

When you are looking at different issues from a unique perspective, you are sure to find a new idea or two to implement to make your recovery plan even stronger.

The best way to create a foolproof recovery plan is to hire and assign a professional team of cybersecurity experts, who will analyze every feature and measure of your organization and create a recovery plan accordingly.

But if your organization was taking services from a third-party supplier, and the supplier got hacked, then things can get more complicated. The reason is, that you don’t have power over your third-party vendors, and cannot implement security measures to suit your convenience.

In this case, the best course of action is to propose a collaboration between their team and yours to implement vendor risk management programs that will benefit both parties while keeping both parties safe from data breaches.

10 Effective Ways to Prevent Data Breaches

Data breaches are costly. That’s why you must do your best and invest all the time and money you can to make sure that your or your organization’s customer data, as well as other critical data, is protected. Here are 10 effective ways you can take for data breach prevention as a small business owner or as an individual employee.

Train Your Employees

Training your employees is one of the best ways to prevent data breaches. With the appropriate training, your employees will have a firm grasp of how to protect their data from a breach.

Particularly with remote work, you should encourage your employees to use separate devices for business purposes and personal activities.

You can’t expect your employees to comply with the updated security rules right away, so it’s a good idea to hold security training sessions to make security practices a habit among the employees. Some critical points you can train your employees on include:

• End-user access and privilege control
• Spotting, avoiding, and reporting phishing scam attempts
• Unique password usage for each account and device
• Documenting system implementation
• Detecting and reporting suspicious data leakage or breaches
• Policy integration regarding the handling, disposal, and transmission of sensitive data.

Create and Update Data Security Procedures

Your organization should have procedures regarding data security standards and constantly update them. Having clear data security procedures will demonstrate what your organization’s expectations are when it comes to data security. It will also demonstrate how seriously you take data security, and encourage your employees to take it seriously as well.

Consider Remote Monitoring

Cyberattacks don’t follow traditional work hours; your data security measures should neither.

You can monitor your network around the clock using remote monitoring.

You can also partner with a managed security service provider like TechForing so you can have 24/7 protection for your systems without staffing additional IT people.

Backup and Recovery

Sometimes cybercriminals maliciously damage, alter, or outright delete all of your data in a data breach event. To avoid losing your data completely, it’s critical that you back up your data regularly so you can easily recover it in case of a data breach, a server crash, or even a natural disaster.

Your IT team should set up an automated remote backup system so it can back up your data automatically and protect you from losing important data.

Take a Detailed Asset Inventory

You should take a detailed inventory of all your software, hardware, physical, and virtual assets so you can get a clear picture of your organization’s current security posture.

After taking an asset inventory, you categorize your assets according to their vulnerability rating. You can take the ratings into account and prioritize the security measures each of these assets may or may not need.

This way, you can assign appropriate security measures to each asset without overspending on security.

Perform a Vulnerability and Compliance Management Evaluation

Every organization must conduct a scheduled Vulnerability and Compliance Management (VCM). If not possible, the least you can do is a simple vulnerability assessment to help you identify all your security gaps and potential risks.

When you have an in-house team running vulnerability management, the team has a better idea of the security landscape of the system.

When you are constantly monitoring both the physical and virtual security environments, data breach options are greatly reduced. It can also help you create a great action plan in case of an attack.

Ensure Endpoint Protection

The best safety measure for a data breach is endpoint protection. A simple antivirus cannot cover and monitor all the endpoints of your network, leaving you vulnerable.

In that case, every device connected to the network becomes a vulnerable endpoint for the hackers to breach.

To learn more about the endpoint protection TechForing can offer for your business, click here.

Secure Data Management

Data management plays a massive role in safeguarding critical data. It’s crucial to safeguard all your data, including physical files, as they can cause a data breach as well.

You should also make sure your physical records are stored securely, and only authorized personnel can have access to it.

When managing data, prioritize keeping only essential information on your computers and regularly reviewing and eliminating unnecessary data. 

You must also be mindful of not storing confidential data in many locations. Always closely follow your organization's or industry’s data retention standards, as some industries require you to store data for a specific amount of time.

Also, before you dispose of anything with confidential data, make sure you destroy it properly. For example, use software to permanently wipe data from devices like your computer, laptops, old phones, etc. Also, cross-cut shred paper files before disposing of them to eliminate any risk of data breach from them.

Protect Network and Devices

Make sure you take proper precautions to avoid a data breach. You should consider purchasing security software and automating it to continuously monitor your network and devices.

Security tools like firewalls, antivirus software, and anti-spyware software are critical for defending your business against data breaches. Make sure these security tools are set up properly. You can work with IT security professionals or consultants to set these up properly.

You should also protect your flash drives, mobile phones, tablets, and other portable devices that are easy to get lost or stolen. Make sure the portable devices are protected with hard-to-guess passwords in place, as well as other security measures, like anti-theft apps installed, so they can only be accessed by authorized users.

Secure Data Transmission

Cybercriminals will sometimes employ techniques like the man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack to infiltrate and intercept data from Wi-Fi. That’s why you need to invest in having a dedicated network that the public can’t access.

You should also take steps to encrypt data, like making sure to use encrypted emails if you’re sending confidential data through email.

Bonus Tip: Team Up With Security Experts

Managing a business can be a time-consuming and complicated process. Investing in an in-house security team can end up being too costly. That’s why you should consider hiring a group of cybersecurity experts.

Collaborating with professionals will allow you to leverage their expertise to fortify your security poster, as well as implement preventative measures, such as vendor risk management programs, so you can stay ahead of evolving threats.

How TechForing Can Help

At TechForing, we offer expert cybersecurity consultation to guide you in developing a proactive cybersecurity strategy. Our enterprise security services ensure complete endpoint security for your organization, as well as comprehensive protection for all your digital assets.

So you can enhance your organization’s cybersecurity resilience and face all the dynamic challenges posed by the ever-changing cybersecurity landscape.

Contact us today to learn more about cybersecurity solutions!