In this hyper-connected world, every enterprise has some form of cyber exposure. Even the most secure organizations are at risk because of data breaches. In the recent flurry of high-profile data breaches, hundreds and millions of consumers had their credit card and debit card details compromised. As a consequence, data breaches cause brand damage, consumer mistrust, and a decrease in sales. Along the same line, we will talk about one of the most popular data breach case studies. It showcases why a strong security strategy is a necessity for every data-driven organization.
What Happened?
Capital One was one of the first banks in the world to invest in migrating their on-premise data centers to a cloud computing environment. However, the poor migration implementation process led to the data leak incident in 2019.
Apart from the huge investments in IT infrastructure. Capital One disclosed that a hacker had access to the company’s confidential customer data. The data includes personal information which the company routinely collects from credit card applications. Data such as names, addresses, zip codes/postal codes, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, dates of birth, and self-reported income.
Read this blog post: 5 Ways Data Breach Can Damage Your Company Financially
Where Did They Go Wrong?
Capital One made the mistake of trusting and relying on its own firewalls to be sure they were always secure. Additionally, the hacker developed a scanning software tool that authorized her to identify servers hosted in a cloud computing enterprise with misconfigured firewalls, allowing the execution of commands from outside to penetrate and access the servers.
The crucial need to balance security with efficiency often leads to disasters. In this case, the data breach occurred due to a configuration failure in the Web Application Firewall (WAF) solution employed by Capital One.
Just like Capital One, it takes months to discover that the enterprise’s assets have been compromised. Hence, to help your enterprise, it’s imperative to know how to shield your organization and its assets from a data breach. Here are 5 measures to secure your business from data breaches.
Assess What Needs Protection
Start by performing a high-level risk analysis and examine your people, processes, and technology closer to identify vulnerabilities. Try to focus on the most critical vulnerabilities instead of everything at once. In most cases, the third-party company can exactly pinpoint the highest risk areas of your organization.
Stepping Up Your Security
Apart from safer procedures, another security consideration for data breach protection is storage security. Storage security is a group of settings that makes storage resources available for trusted networks. For instance, cloud storage providers use a variety of safeguarding options whose sole purpose is managing security for systems.
- Tiered Accessed Controls
To prevent employee theft or accidental access, The ‘tiers’ in tiered access are levels of sensitivity applied to the organization’s different services. Google uses 4 tiers: untrusted, basic access, privileged access, and highly privileged access.
- Automatic Security Updates
The primary objective of this feature is that providers can handle and manage regular security updates all by themselves.
- Two-step authentication
To prevent theft via stolen passwords a code is sent to another device like a mobile phone login to ensure the true account holder is logging in to the system.
Destroy Before Disposal
In the traditional settings, all the data was hard copied. Hence, to ensure there are no leaks in the hardcopy of sensitive information, always cross-cut shred files before disposing of them.
In the case of digital formats, just deleting the data does not erase the information. Hence, the owner should physically destroy the hard drive which contains the information.
Cloud Encryption
Encrypting data into the cloud ensures that even if that data falls into the wrong hands, it is useless as long as its keys remain secure. Files stored and managed using a storage cloud are encrypted upon storage in the central system. Without a user with valid decryption, key files are both inaccessible as well as unreadable.
System Auditing
Less than 20% of companies regularly test and keep their plans up to date. During testing, document and store “action items” and “lessons learned”. And assign amends to iron out any kinks before a breach can occur. Also, make sure your response plan meets minimum regulatory and legal requirements. Otherwise, the customers may consider a company negligent in its responsibilities if a breach occurs.
To sum up, on top of the financial damage of a breach like that of Capital One, the total number of data breaches is rising each year making it all the more important to make security a top priority for the future. Although you can’t eradicate the possibility of data breaches, you can reduce their likelihood and minimize the damage if one occurs with the right security practices.
