Many companies are taking their cybersecurity seriously, but as they implement stronger security measures, attackers are getting sneakier. For example, account takeover is a popular attack vector, but it’s not always easy to detect. Attackers rely less on simply sending an email to employees with a virus-laden file; in many cases, attackers gravitate toward more sophisticated tactics to compromise credentials. Phishing emails now trend toward impersonating management or other social engineering attempts.
The problem with account takeovers and similar attacks is that they are difficult to detect. It appears that data is being accessed by legitimate users, so when a data breach occurs, it can be very challenging to trace the source and what data was leaked or stolen. Improving your organization’s security fabric through data visibility and security tools can improve your understanding of your environment, which will make tracking an attack much less difficult.
Data Breaches are a Major Threat
There has been a cybersecurity risk for organizations as long as they have been online, and as attack surfaces grow, the number of data breaches grows also. In 2022, over 420 million people had been affected by a security incident, and there had been 1802 data breaches in the United States alone. Between 2020 and 2022, the cost of data breaches or security incidents increased 13%, and the 2023 average cost is expected to hit $5 million by the end of the year.
No company, especially a small or medium-sized one, wants to lose millions of dollars, but inadequate protection measures put many organizations at risk. Lowering the potential cost is possible, but there are several factors that cause the numbers to be so high, including paid ransoms, financial losses due to disgruntled customers or lack of access to your online platforms, and legal costs and penalties for failing to secure customer data.
Besides the costs to you, there are financial repercussions to your customers. Many victims of data breaches become victims of identity theft as well, or they may have other accounts that are later compromised, causing a host of issues. It is often these customers who have been most affected that pursue litigation and will ask for compensation.
Data Breach Root Cause Analysis is Challenging
Ideally, it would be possible to avoid all data breaches, and failing that, to prevent any consequences to your organization or to your customers. However, understanding what happened to cause a breach and identifying compromised data can be extremely difficult. With so many possible attack vectors and massive amounts of data to track, finding the location of compromised data within your database can monopolize your time and resources.
Another problem for security teams is novel attacks. It’s difficult enough to pinpoint the problem when an attack follows typical patterns, but if the attacker was feeling creative that day, it can be next to impossible to find the exploit. This is especially true if your organization’s data visibility is poor.
Data visibility refers to knowing what data you have, where the data is stored, and whether that data has appropriate security relative to their sensitivity levels. Many organizations struggle with this, sometimes because they lack data governance policies, sometimes because protocols change but no one assesses old data to make sure it is all stored correctly based on the new standards. Whatever the reason, attackers will take advantage of improperly classified data, and you will be none the wiser.
Streamlining Data Breach Prevention and Investigation
If you don’t know where your data is, you aren’t likely to know if an attacker has accessed it. One of the best solutions for this is an automated data classification solution that will screen your database for files that are improperly stored or do not follow the typical rules of your organization. You will receive alerts about anomalies in both data storage and user access.
Rather than attempting to manually pore over all of your data looking for what an attacker has been up to, you can check user access logs that have tracked which users accessed what data and when they did so. If you are attacked through compromised credentials, these logs and alerts for unusual activity will help you pinpoint where the attack started.
There are a lot of data security solutions out there, but the best ones will have broad security coverage, meaning that it can be used for your local devices and cloud storage. They should be able to classify your data based on its sensitivity and account for the context of that data within your organization. Finally, a good security solution will offer centralized data management, allowing you to view alerts, access logs, and reports about the state of your data storage environment.
Tracking down the cause and contents of a breach is challenging, especially if you have poor data visibility. As data breaches become more common, expensive, and difficult to overcome, organizations need strong data security solutions that can help them better understand their data security environments. By utilizing these tools, companies improve their chances of successfully preventing a breach or, if one does occur, of recovering quickly.