Large scale data breaches have made for big time headlines in the past few months. The most notorious being the Target data breach over the holiday season with 40 million debit and credit card accounts compromised.
Time magazine reported on May, 23 that Ebay was also hit with a massive cyberattack that exposed the account information of 100 million users. The Attorney Generals of Florida, Connecticut and Illinois along with the authorities in the EU and UK have opened an investigation into this cyberattack.
The trend is abundantly clear. Cyberattacks are becoming far more complex and the size of the breaches are increasingly larger. This being said, what can you do to protect your business from cyberattack? Here are 7 things that can reduce the costs of data breach, and how the U.S leads the way.
Encryption
This is a no brainer but should be mentioned anyway. Encryption serves as a deterrent to potential hackers. They are not going to invest the time to decode your encryption because hackers want easy targets. Just like burglars, hackers are opportunist.
Quarantine The Breach
If a hacker gets into your sensitive data the best thing you can do is put up firewalls around the rest of your data. Once you have isolated the incident, a forensic expert can examine how your data was breached and address the vulnerability.
Establish A Risk Tolerance
Being proactive about your data security is one of the best defensive measures that you can take. Knowing what is vital to your core business and what is expendable can reduce the costs of a data breach. The best way to set up this defense is to prioritize based on the criticality to your business.
Employee Education
Educating your employees about the ways that their credentials can be stolen is a proactive step that should be taken. Alert employees to phising scams and malware that can infect their personal computers. Educating your employees can reduce the likelihood of an cyberattack. Did you know the median number between intrusion and detection was 87 days! While detection and containment was only 7 days?
Two-Factor Authentication
Two-Factor Authentication should be used to protect your business against data breach. Even if a hacker gets your credentials they would still need a token that generates a one time PIN for logging in to your system.
Strong Passwords
This is obvious and easy to do. Using passwords that require a minimum of eight characters that include upper and lower case letters will help you protect your information in the long run. For extra website security it is a good idea to salt the passwords, using a new salt per password.
When using salted passwords the cracking of a large number of passwords is even slower because every guess has to be hashed separately for every salt + password which is computationally very expensive.
Server Hardening
Server hardening is the process of reducing the number of avenues from which your systems can be attacked. By keeping servers clean from outdated or unnecessary software, services, configurations and users, it gives bad guys fewer ways to infiltrate your IT.
Implementing these proven defense mechanisms will reduce the cost of any future data breach. Cyberattacks and data breaches are a fact of life, but it doesn't mean you have to be willing victim.
The Ponemon Institute has released its 2014 cost of data breach study and found that the average cost of a data breach rose 15 percent to $3.5 million.
US companies reportedly experience an average cost per record in a breach based on malicious or criminal attacks that is significantly higher, at $246 per compromised record.
With statistics like this having a meaningful line of defense against data breach is extremely important. Let us help your business tackle this problem. Contact us today, we look forward to helping protect your business.
