What is a Data Breach?
Data Breach is the loss or theft of information stored on computer systems that compromises security or privacy. Often affecting a large number of individuals, it can include a range of information including financial data, personal health records and login credentials.
Individuals who suffer a breach may lose personal information such as bank account details, credit card numbers and passwords. Criminals can then use this to steal identities, access social media accounts and financial services, or simply ruin a person’s credit rating or make purchases in their name. This is especially damaging in regulated sectors such as healthcare or finance.
Companies who experience a breach must quickly identify the source of the data, assess its value and integrity, and determine how many people have been affected. This is a legal requirement and can also help them regain trust. The best way to do this is with robust data analytics. This can help them understand what went wrong, prevent future breaches and identify how the breach occurred.
A breach is often caused by external attackers but internal cyberattacks are also common. These can be malicious attacks from current employees, contractors or partners or a result of insufficient security measures. Malware can disrupt endpoint devices or slow network servers causing applications to fail, thereby exposing data. A more sophisticated form of attack is a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) which involves attacking a system from a large number of different IP addresses, exhausting resources and sabotaging application availability.