What’s a data breach?
In simple words, a data breach is nothing but an incident where private, case sensitive information gets leaked, copied, accessed by someone who shouldn’t be able to have any such rights. It may be an external or internal source trying to access your stuff which is obviously without your precise permission. Information of the type like banking details, credit cards, transaction details and even the personal information including DOB, name, address etc. can be used to steal what was once yours.
What results or causes a breach of data?
To be precise, there seems to exist an infinite list of reasons or causes that result in a data breach. Few of them are as follows:
Denial to access:
It’s a form of revenge where the hackers feel they’ve been denied some sort of right or rights and hence attack as a result. However, it is only a small percentage which may only be visible in statistics and graphs.
Skimming of cards:
Thieves are of all types and could do anything to get an extra buck. These hackers are so innovative that now they can actually skim your payment cards, take away whatever’s left in it, and leave the bill for you to pay. All thanks to technology as all of this is possible only in the days of today and wasn’t really possible yesterday (few years earlier).
Crime ware:
A special kind of software crated to gather and retrieve information and remove any barriers that may or may not exist in the path of a hacker and the confidential data of the user. It only needs to be placed just once and if done, it can cause severe damage to the leftover data resulting in proper data breach.
POS (point of sale intrusions):
This type of attack is specifically targeted towards POS systems that are utilized in managing transactions. It has so much importance and is ranked to be one of the leading reasons of data losses occurring around the world (28% approximate).
Steps to avoid data breaches:
Now that you know how data breaches occur, what are the causes, how it damages you etc. it’s time for you to learn how to show full strength against such data breaches to protect and secure data using software and other strategies.
Set a strategy:
Waiting for the hackers to attack and respond as a result of an attack is one of the biggest means of data losses occurring globally. Website owners must make arrangements before it even happens that would eventually reduce the risk. Hence, proper planning and strategizing is highly important.
Following steps are supposed to be considered in case of an attack or a breach:
- Giving a prompt notification to the customers
- Identifying the magma of the attack
- Ensuring all legal procedures to report the event
- Involving your insurance carrier and agent
- Managing communications
Evaluate the depth of a breach:
In case of a breach, you must first of all identify the exact magnitude of the damage done. In addition, you must make sure all the systems that weren’t attacked are having their security active to avoid any more loss. Furthermore, the data lost must be categorized with the type having the most importance having top priority and vice versa. This lets the organization to know what the damage is and make arrangements accordingly.
Fix it:
Now that you know what exactly the damage was, it’s time for you to make amendments to the loss. An expert could provide you all the needed information in recovering your loss and further advice you in how to not get attacked again. If the data which was lost was luckily uploaded on to the cloud storage, than consider you have faced less or no disturbance as the data can be easily recovered back. If not, you might just have to rearrange the data again either by doing all the hard work yet again, or use some data recovery software to recover the data if recoverable.
