Cybersecurity is a continuous phenomenon. New countless threats emerge every day and cybersecurity analysts continually develop a fast, reliable, and sophisticated techniques to thwart these notorious threats in order to prevent financial loss and reputational damage. According to the Analysts, like the previous year (2018), 2019 will also witness the increase in data breaches. However, the effective and reliable security solutions such as a SIEM or SOAR can protect organizations from being breached. In fact, a data breach occurs once cyber pests successfully intercept data transmission and extract sensitive information. This could be done physically by accessing a PC or through infiltrating a network remotely.
Why Data Privacy and Security is Necessary?
Data privacy and security have become a vital part of today’s digital world. Data resides in every type of organization including governmental, non-governmental, and even military organizations. Governments store critical data such as the data about national security and citizens’ private information. The military may store sensitive data about enemies, spying information, and so on. Since the privacy and security of such data and information is inevitable, therefore, data privacy and security techniques are necessary for every type of organization.
What Can Be the Consequences of the Data Breach?
The consequence of a data breach can be severe and disastrous in terms of financial loss and reputational damage. For example, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) imposes stiff conditions on organizations about data security.
What are the Preventive Measures?
The following sections will gain insight into some preventive measures and best practices that organizations and individuals must adapt to avoid data breaches in 2019.
- Global privacy laws such as HIPAA and PCI-DSS are very important for data security. Another example of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is on the limelight. According to the ESET Trends Report 2019, for any consumer or organization concerned about the privacy of private information in this digital world, 2018 would stand out as being a year that the GDPR came into force in European Union (EU). GDPR had a big impact on digital privacy, not only in EU but also on other countries. This trend will also be seen in 2019 and even beyond.
- Traditional security methods such as the use of antivirus programs are losing their veracity in IT security realm. Alternatively, the organizations are looking for modern tools including SIEM and SOAR solutions. These solutions are more effective against today’s most sophisticated attacks. Therefore, organizations must focus on deploying these solutions to prevent data breaches altogether or reduce the chance of their occurrence. However, the enterprises can also use antivirus and firewalls as additional layers of security.
- Human error is also responsible for a variety of data breaches. For example, having a less experience or incompetent IT professionals may entangle your organization into a big nightmare.
- Since human error counts, Automation through machines is the best solution. It doesn’t mean eliminating the manpower altogether. However, the role of humans should be reduced at a possible level.
- Developing and Complying with organization privacy policy is also crucial. For instance, the users must change their passwords periodically to avert password attacks such as dictionary attack and rainbow table attack.
- Training and education for employees are also essential. For example, the employees must be educated about clean desk policies, BYOD, the use of removable media, safe internet habits, the use of social media, prevention of tailgating, and training about Email scams and hoaxes.
- Perform vulnerability assessments once a month or maybe weekly. Frequently scanning the safety controls and contents of each system within the network (internal and external) is necessary to prevent malicious hackers from infiltrating your network.
- An effective Data Breach Response Plan must be in place to better respond in the event of an occurrence of a real breach. Doing so help your organization to contain the breach in a timely manner and to mitigate its impact.
- Patch management should also be applied across all applications being used in your IT environment.
- Data backup technique is also vital to prevent data loss or data corruption.
Conclusion
Though cybersecurity threats are sophisticated and greater in frequency, having the effective and reliable data breach prevention techniques can save your organization from being financially damaged. In this article, we have learned 10 preventive measures to thwart data breaches in 2019.
