You hear the news about data breaches, where tens of thousands or even millions of records with personal information have been compromised. As frightening as that is, being able to quickly determine that a breach has occurred allows your technology team to leap into action and begin remediation. Unfortunately, a cyber security event seldom happens as you see in the movies — with flashing lights noting that they’re been unlawful activity detected unless you have a secure solution in place that is actively looking for a breach. Instead, you may find out weeks later that some of your sensitive data has been compromised. Are your technology professionals well enough versed in cyber security that they could detect a breach?
Causes of a Data Breach
It’s easy to blame all data breaches on a cyber criminal. However, according to Ponemon Institute’s 2018 Cost of a Data Breach Study, more than 25% of breaches are caused by glitches in the system with another quarter caused by lack of awareness and human error. Only around half of the data breaches are truly caused by malicious activity. This points to the need for ongoing employee education as well as tighter security measures around data storage and transport.
Majority of Data Breaches Are Discovered Externally
It’s a sad fact, but the majority of data breaches are actually discovered by law enforcement, fraud protection organizations and your customers are the leading identifiers of a data breach. While your internal technology and business teams are focused on the day-to-day management of your business, breaches may go undiscovered for some period of time. Credit card processors are often the first line of defense for a significant breach, as they have created algorithms to detect unlawful activity.
Identifying High Value Data
For legal, healthcare and dental businesses, best practices recommend that you identify data that is high value within your organization. This could be anything from customer financial information such as payment methods or protected health information (PHI). These are all items that are worth top dollar on the open market, making them highly targeted by hackers.
Active Monitoring Processes
Once your most valuable and important data has been identified, now it’s time to put a process in place to watch the data and how it’s being accessed and used. Anytime abnormal levels of access or activity are identified, your active monitoring process should trigger an alert to your security team that there could be something going on with the high value data. This level of intrusion detection can reduce the possibility of a catastrophic data loss within your organization. Having a quick notification that there’s a problem can also allow you to accelerate resolution of the breach and take steps for remediation.
Rapid Remediation
Once a data breach has been identified, it’s crucial that professionals take immediate steps to close the breach and begin notifying any customers who were affected. This allows people to quickly resolve any potential problems that could occur as the result of the data breach. Practicing good data management procedures such as only keeping the information that you need in order to do business and taking steps to safeguard data at rest and in transit will all help reduce the possibility of a catastrophic loss. Once a breach has occurred, taking immediate action indicates to the business community and to your customers that you are actively monitoring and safeguarding their information — reducing the possibility of a public relations nightmare.
At Coretelligent, we developed our full suite of cyber security services to include CoreArmor into an extremely proactive solution to meet the advanced needs of today’s data-heavy organizations. Learn more about how CoreArmor, CoreCloud and 360 Support work together to provide a comprehensive security solution to meet your needs. Contact us today at 855-841-5888 or via email to info@coretelligent.com.
