I recently wrote an article “Protecting Against Data Breaches Is Serious Business” for Enterprise Features. (The byline is me, pseudonyms are my friend.) It was relevant this last March, and it’s seriously relevant today. Here’s an excerpt and a link to the full article:
Protecting Against Data Breaches Is Serious Business
In late 2016, the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) and CyberScout reported that business data breaches were up 40% from the year before–and that only included reported breaches. Almost half of the breaches occurred in the business sector. This sector stores valuable customer information, yet the level of data breach protection ranges from pretty good to completely inadequate.
Regulated sectors except for healthcare did well, with the education sector, government / military, and financial sectors at a low number of reported breaches. The financial sector was lowest of all, which makes sense given the industry’s robust compliance and security. However, despite privacy regulations healthcare failed badly, reporting nearly 35% of the overall number of data breaches.
Data attack types abound. Skimming is a popular criminal activity at the consumer level, where humans or hidden scanners steal credit information from a credit or debit card. And even simple device theft can be devastating. Coca-Cola found this out when a disgruntled employee stole several laptops containing highly sensitive personal information on over 70,000 employees and contractors (Moral of the story: encrypt sensitive data on mobile devices.)
In most businesses however, cyberattacks like hacking and phishing caused the most damage. Two of the largest hacks in Internet history happened on Yahoo’s watch. There were two occurrences, the first in 2013 and the second in 2014. The 2014 breach affected over 500 million user accounts. The 2013 breach affected – get this – 1 billion user accounts. Stolen data included customer names and email, phone numbers, security Q&A, birthdates, and passwords. Although Yahoo did not publicly report the breaches until 2016, at the time they involved the FBI thanks to disturbing evidence of state-sponsored cyber activity.
And here’s the kicker: as of March 1, 2017, Yahoo reported that an additional 32 million user accounts have been hacked. The hacking is probably related to the 2014 breach.
Hacking and Phishing: What’s the Difference?
To read about the difference and learn lots more great stuff, read the entire article here.
[Are you interested in high value articles for B2B trade pubs but don’t have the time? I lost count of the articles I’ve written for clients and publications. Let’s talk! Email me today at christine@christineltaylor.com.]