A data breach is akin to a home invasion. During a home invasion, a burglar would break into your home during the silence of the night and steal your valuables without you knowing it until it is too late. This is exactly what a data breach feels like to organizations.

Data breaches are a common occurrence across the globe. In fact, hundreds of thousands of businesses experience a certain level of data breach every year. To put things into perspective, IBM’s Cost of Data Breach 2022 report revealed that 83% of the surveyed organizations had experienced more than one data breach. No organization that collects personal or sensitive data is safe against the threat of unauthorized or illegal access to or loss or destruction of data. However, what they can do is take appropriate steps to prevent data breaches to some extent or minimize their impact.

But what exactly is a data breach? How does it occur? What are the consequences that organizations have to shoulder due to a breach? And, more importantly, what organizations can do to prevent or mitigate data breaches. If you wish to find answers to all these questions, we suggest you continue reading.

What Is a Data Breach?

Data breaches are security incidents that lead to loss, alteration, illegal or unauthorized destruction or unauthorized disclosure of, or unauthorized access to personal data that is processed, stored, or transmitted by an organization.

A cyber threat actor, an individual or a group, uses various tools and methods to execute a data breach. For instance, a threat actor may breach a corporate network through malware, also called malicious software. Or, they could disguise themselves as a corporate employee and send phishing emails containing malicious links to existing employees.

Often, the inherent vulnerabilities in the system or misconfigured settings give cyber attackers a way into the corporate network, such as a misconfigured cloud service or application that may have a default password or an unprotected publicly accessible storage bucket.

Data breaches have wide-reaching consequences that can greatly impact an organization’s financial and reputational position. Therefore, preventing and responding to such cyber threats has become ever more critical.

For starters, we’ve witnessed the non-stop proliferation of data due to the increased number of devices, systems, and applications. In fact, we are leveraging data to generate more data. The abundance of personal data across different systems and devices creates more opportunities for attackers to gain unauthorized access to personal data. Therefore, it is important for organizations to primarily curb the occurrence of such incidents and mitigate their effects where necessary.

Secondly, and most importantly, due to the growing instances of data breaches and other threats, international regulatory authorities have enacted data protection and privacy laws. These laws give more control to individuals over their data and place greater responsibilities upon businesses in relation to data protection, integrity, accountability, and privacy. Hence, in the current era, a data breach means not only heavy loss of data but also huge regulatory fines.