Better Ways to Handle Data Breach Attacks for Businesses
With most cyberattacks incorporating advanced technologies, like AI, from large scale enterprises to Small or Medium Businesses (SMB), no business is an exception from data breaches. The cyber-attacks are so intense that in the year 2015, the CIA chief John Brennan’s personal email was hacked by a teenager.
Irrespective of the millions of dollars poured into the cybersecurity arena, and the cyberattacks continue to worry businesses. It is understood that not all the data breaches aimed at creating financial losses; they also aimed at damaging company reputation and business opportunities.
In this blog, we present a piece of detailed information aimed to assist businesses in reducing the impact of data breaches.
Commonly Exploited Business Data in Data Breaches
Data exploitation and breaches can smudge a company’s trust, brand, and reputation. Irrespective of the type of industry, all business leaders should be acquainted with the intentions behind cyber-attacks. Most of the data breaches are targeted to exploit the following data:
- Social Security Numbers
- Date of birth
- Email addresses
- Finance related to digital asset information
- Phone numbers
- Passwords
- Identity theft
- Health records
Overview of Data Breach In US
Here is a must to watch insights of IBM research on data breaches. The stats should be looked at, not as a just number, rather these stats should be looked at as the areas or root causes to be considered by large-scale businesses and, most significantly, SMBs to thoroughly discover and strengthen their security framework.
- Globally the cost of data breach amplified significantly, where the average value is estimated to be increased by 6.4 percent.
- Globally, data breaches are high in the United States and the Middle East, where the cost in the USA is expected to be $7.91 million, and in the Middle East to be $5.31 million.
- The United States tops in terms of notification costs of a data breach, which is estimated to be $740,00.
- The post-data breach response costs of the United States is approximated to $1.76 million.
- The United States had the maximum indirect per capita costs of a data breach, which is $152. Indirect costs comprise employees’ time, effort, and other organizational resources paid in warning who suffered losses and inspecting the happening. Apart from this, it also includes lost customer trust.
- 48 percent of all breaches are due to malicious or criminal attacks.
- The average cost per record to resolve either malicious or criminal attack is estimated to be $157.
- The data breach costs due to glitches in the system are estimated to be $131 per record, and due to human mistake or negligence is approximated to be $128 per record.
- Organizations that lost less than one percent of their customers due to a data breach resulted in an average total cost of $2.8 million. If 4% or higher percentage of lost customer trust results in the average total value of $6 million.
- 48% of incidents are due to a malicious or criminal attack, 27% of the attacks are due to human factor, and 25% is due to glitches in IT and business systems or processes.
Steps to Consider to Lower Data Breach Costs
Following are the aspects a business should anticipate for reducing the probabilities and influence of data breaches:
1. Involve business leaders to create security as a culture across the organization
2. Usage of Data Loss Protection software
3. Security analytics platform usage
4. Artificial intelligence-driven security platform
5. Employee training on cybersecurity awareness
6. Business continuity management participation
7. Widespread usage of encryption
8. Incident response team
9. Get Cyber Insurance protection
10. Onboard Cyber threat intelligence tools
11. Data classification schema
12. Appointing Chief Information Security Officer (CISO)
13. Conduct a cyber-security readiness assessment
14. Consult with your attorney how better you can handle data breaches
15. Contact local law enforcement for their protocols for a ransomware attack
16. Multi-level password protection and management tools or mechanisms
If you keen to have assistance on strategies to defend your business against data breaches, please feel free to get in touch with our experts.
