What is Data Breach?
When confidential or secure information is released to an untrusted environment, intentionally or unintentionally, it is known as a data breach. A data breach might involve unintentional information disclosure, loss or theft of data, information leakage, and data leak.
Today data is turning into a valuable and more vulnerable resource for all the businesses and organizations because of the growth of the digital economy.
With the increasing significance of data, risks of sensitive data breaching are also increasing. For most organizations, data is the key input for maintaining competitiveness and growth.
Measures to Prevent Data Breach
Data protection from being breached is done for ethical and legal reasons and personal privacy. Sensitive data that needs to be protected are email addresses, phone numbers, credit cards, and debit card numbers, passwords, login IDs, trade secrets, and industry-specific data.
There are various measures that businesses can use to prevent a data breach. Some of the major measures are:
- Security Awareness Training:
- Investment in Security
- Following the Data Protection Regulations
- Performing of Data Vulnerability Assessments
- Developing a plan for Data Breach Response
Security Awareness Training:
Employees play a major role in keeping the data of the organization secure. But, they can be ineffective and weak in data security without any awareness training on data security.
With the emergence of the Internet of Things devices and cloud storage, the vulnerability of data has also increased.
It is important to provide efficient training to employees to ensure that they are well informed about data security, have the technical know-how of risks, threats, and leakages.
Regular updates of security policies should also be there for the prevention of threats.
Investment in Security Technology:
Every industry and organization needs measures for cybersecurity to protect their sensitive data.
It is not just enough to install security networks such as antivirus systems and firewalls. Organizations also need a layered approach against monitoring and identifying safety threats by investing in the right security technology.
The use of policies and encryption standards with updated software will help in the minimization of data vulnerabilities.
Following the Data Protection Regulations:
When businesses set regulations for data protection, they prioritize the protection of data and prevention of data leaks.
To ensure the compliance of the regulations set, the best way to ensure is by creating a policy for data security that will keep the data safe from threats and breaching, both internally and externally.
Performing of Data Vulnerability Assessments: Determination of risks and identifying, classifying and prioritizing security threats to the business is known as vulnerability assessment.
This process is performed to make a checklist for data protection.
Different aspects of an organization are considered such as data storage, adequate policies, and procedures, and remote access to employees while performing a vulnerability assessment.
Developing a plan for Data Breach Response:
Most organizations do not set up or plan a framework for data breach response. However, such plans play a crucial role in dealing with data breaches.
The main aim of this response plan is to deal better with cybersecurity events, restoring employee and public trust, limiting the damages by setting responsibilities and roles for this process.
It also involves summarizing the investigation procedure.
With the continuous use of technology in businesses and government organizations, their confidential information is also at risk of being exposed because of growing cybercrime and data breaches.
To prevent a data breach, these measures must be prioritized by every organization for the safety and security of their data.
