You know how frightening a data breach can be for you and your organization. A data breach primarily occurs when the information of your business is accessed without your authorization. Dubsmash, Adobe, Yahoo, MySapce, My Fitness Pal experienced some of the most critical data breaches in the 21st century. These breaches had put the data of millions of users at risk.
Businesses face financial loss because of data breaches and suffer massively in terms of the customers’ reputation and trust. With the progress in technology, a good percentage of information is available on digital platforms. Because of this reason, there has been a surge in the incidents of the data breach. There are multiple reasons for cybercrime. However, the primary reason is that it is a profitable industry for hackers and attackers. Hackers misuse personal information to steal money and compromise identities.
Here, let us take a quick look at some of the most common causes of data breaches.
Table of Contents
Physical Device Theft
The first and the first thing that comes into our mind whenever someone mentions cybersecurity issue is hackers sitting in a dark room in black clothes and stealing our information. Nonetheless, physical device theft is undoubtedly one of the most prevalent ways that lead to data leaks. People who intend to mishandle or steal your data can trespass into your premise, get hold of all the unattended laptops, and get access to the company’s crucial data. To ensure that such breaches never happen, it is vital to ensure that you never leave your devices unattended. At all times, your devices should be password protected and do not ever share your passwords with anyone.
Weak Credentials
Weak credentials are a significant cause of security breach, says Joseph, who offers online accounting assignment help services. If you set a weak password, it will get stolen easily. Unfortunately, many people set predictable and simple passwords, such as 123456, Password123, and qwerty, etc. These are very easy for criminals to hack and get access to your data. Moreover, since your passwords are so simple, they do not even have to work hard to attain your sensitive information. Bear in mind, even moderately securely passwords are not secure.
In fact, these are easy for hackers to track by performing a few computer programs via popular credentials. Whenever you select a password, do not set anything that is very common. You can instead use a combination of signs, numbers, and alphabets. A lot of times, we use the same password for all our accounts. It is strictly advised to avoid this practice.
Moreover, it would be best if you did not write down the passwords on any piece of paper. What if somebody you do not want to gets access to this paper? All of your passwords will be known to them.
Human Error
Another significant cause of data breach is human error. You may think that a few bugs cause data breach, but it would not be wrong to say that even the bugs resulting from a human error are also quite common.
The human error includes:
- Using weak passwords
- Setting the same to same password for all the accounts
- Sharing your password with someone
- Sharing your sensitive information with a wrong person
To ensure that such errors do not happen, the companies need to ensure that every employee practices all the required data security measures. Educating and training employees can be of significant help.
Phishing
The phishing scam is another common data breach that is very common these days. Via these scams, the hackers steal the confidential and personal information of the person. In a phishing attack, the attacker will send emails, which look like the ones that may be from a genuine company. The objective of the phishing email is to lure the receiver into downloading the infected file or clicking on the malicious link to acquire all the financial information from the person, says Zack, who offers Matlab homework help
Application Vulnerabilities
Today, there is absolutely no software that comes bereft of any vulnerabilities. Trespassers take advantage of this situation and misuse it in several different ways. Organizations continually strive to look for loopholes to rectify them before an attacker misuses it. Anytime a vulnerability is fixed, the software provider will release a patch. All the organization employees must use it while they are using the program. You need to complete the process at the earliest because if the attackers find out about the vulnerability, they go after organizations, which are still exposed to the risk.
Malware
Not all security breaches are complex. An example of malware can prove it. Attackers purchase malicious software, and then they hunt for a system, which has any known vulnerability. After they find that system, they plant malware into it and then exploit their data.
There are several different types of malware. It can either track down all of the user’s activities or locks the user’s system and then extracts money to unlock or regain access.
