Data leak or data breach is the recent terror in the modern digital economic environment – a minor data security compromise and any company, authority, or even government can experience heavy losses for having their customers’ and business-critical data exposed and misused.
A single day hardly passes without a data leakage hitting the news headlines. From decreasing profit to massive fines, a data breach can cause havoc that no organisation ever wants to undergo.
To ensure compliance with relevant legislation and safeguard your customer and business data from frauds, having proper knowledge about data breaches and taking essential technical measures are a must.
So, what is data leak and how does it happen? Let’s dive deep into it.
What is Data Leak?
Now the question is, what is a data protection incident/data breach?A data breach or data leak means the accidental or illegitimate transmission, loss, disclosure, or exposure of confidential and sensitive data to an untrusted environment due to a security incident. Data leakage can occur when a hacker can successfully breach the security of a system and hamper data integrity. What is more alarming is data breaches can cause exfiltration – unlawful data transportation or copying without even hitting the data source.
The average size of a data breach was 25,575 records in 2019, involving a cost of $3.92 million, which was $3.86 million in 2018. It indicates that regardless of business or types of the provided service, there is no alternative to implementing stringent data protection measures and analysing your company’s potential data security risk to upgrade overall protection behaviour.
Targeted Data in Personal Data Breach
The most targeted data to leak in the event of a data breach are:
- Financial Data: Bank or credit card details, invoices and tax information, transaction statements, etc.
- Intellectual property: copyrights, trademarks, client records, trade secrets, etc
- PII (Personally Identifiable Information): Any data about an identified or identifiable individual
- PHI (Personal Health Information): Demographics, health records and histories, lab reports, mental and physical health conditions, insurance information, etc., that a practitioner requires to identify a patient and ensure effective healthcare.
Types of Data Theft
What qualifies as a data breach and what are different types of data theft that every business must be aware of? The most common types of data leak/data breach that can cause you heavy loss include:
Physical Security Breaches
Even a minor carelessness of employees can cause businesses millions of losses. The possible causes include:
- Accidental misplace of a record having confidential business data.
- Stealing the prototype of a not-yet-released service selling it to competitors
- Stealing of essential data and more
Phishing Attacks
Phishing is when third-party scammers and fraudsters design software systems, applications, or sites, mirroring and resembling genuine websites with millions of users. Once users fall into their prey and submit their confidential data, including bank details, user account passwords, etc., the scammers steal them for fraud purposes.
XSS Attacks
XSS attack or cross-site scripting is one of the most common causes of data breaches resulting in around 40% of data leaks each year.
It is the process of injecting and storing malicious scripts into a trusted and benign site HTML and gaining access to a visitor’s confidential information once they try to send their search query to the server unknowingly accessing the infected webpage.
Ransomware Attacks
From 2018 to 2020, ransomware attacks have doubled, making it one of the common types of data breaches that companies should worry about.
Ransomware is a blend of words Ransom and Malware that describes particular malware attacks, like crypto-ransomware, locker ransomware, etc., that hack the IT infrastructure and data system of a company, restrict authorised users from accessing them and demand ransom in exchange for giving the access back.
Other common causes of data leak are:
- Denial-of-Service: A particular data security incident when a flood of requests through connecting multiple online devices overwhelm a site and block genuine traffic from accessing the network to crash the servers.
- Password Attacks: Password breaches mean using a software program by scammers for trying different passwords and breaching a user’s sensitive data.
- Malware: Malware, both indirect and direct, are another security incident that can cripple a business’s optimal operations. It is basically a specially designed intrusive, malicious and unlawful software program that gives scammers unauthorised access to a user’s data and computer system, breaches its security, and causes massive data exposure. Malware examples include Trojan viruses, worms, viruses, worms, spyware, etc.
Data leakage is not only a massive issue for a company, but it can be a headache for individual users also – possibility of identity theft and personal details, frequent password changes, going through identity monitoring, enacting credit freezes, etc.
What to Do in the Event of a Data Breach?
What are the five steps to handling a data breach in the event of a data breach and after it occurs?
- Notify the Supervisory Authority within 72 Hours: Once an organisation identifies a breach, it must report it to the supervisory authority at its earliest convenience. For example, a company within the EU and EEA and beyond that deals with EU residents’ personal data must inform DPA about the data disclosure within 72 hours of breach identification according to GDPR.
- Notify Data Subjects and Disclose All Necessary Information: The data controller of a company must inform their data subjects of the data breach if the leaked data includes users’ confidential information like health records, financial details, etc. According to GDPR, the organisation facing data leak must notify users about the nature of the breach, contact data of the data protection officer, potential consequences of the breach, and the immediate actions taken by the data controller to address the data breach and bypass the harmful effects.
What to do if your data is breached? After a data breach, a company should:
- Verify the source of the breach
- Change its account password to restrict fraudsters from accessing your mission-critical data soon after a data breach occurs.
- Back up and download business data stored in the company server to secure it from deletion, corruption, and more.
Now, what are my rights if my data has been breached? According to GDPR, as a data subject, you can complain against the organisation handling your personal information, and claim compensation if your data is compromised.
How to Prevent Data Leakage
- Ensure updating and patching software systems soon after the release and keep your OS updated.
- Encrypt your company’s critical information with high-grade data encryption.
- Evaluate permissions and ensure access to confidential data to trustworthy employees with valid reasons only. This privileged data access assignment method will also surface any suspicious intruders facilitating critical data exfiltration.
- Implement BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) policies.
- Implement multi-factor authentication upon login request.
- Comply with relevant data protection regulations and train your staff members on how they can be on top of compliance and escape socially engineered data breaches.
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