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Data Breach is a cybersecurity incident where confidential, private, or protected information is copied, transmitted, viewed, or stolen by someone who is not authorized to do so. These incidents expose sensitive data to attackers and can cause financial losses, reputational damage, regulatory penalties, and lost productivity.

The most common type of breach involves unauthorized access to an organization’s internal systems. This can occur through misconfigured cloud environments, malware attacks, or employee error and theft. Attackers can exploit these weaknesses to steal credentials, evade security controls, and gain privileged access to internal network infrastructure and backend database servers. Attackers then exfiltrate high-value data from these areas to sell on dark web marketplaces, conduct identity theft, or use as leverage for extortion.

A breach can also be caused by malicious actors outside of the company. These types of threats may use phishing campaigns, social engineering tactics, or unpatched software vulnerabilities to compromise devices or networks and then steal data. In many cases, these attacks involve nation states or other state-sponsored actors.

When a data breach occurs, organizations must report it to regulators and affected individuals as mandated by regulations. These requirements vary by industry and jurisdiction. For example, US federal law (HIPAA) and European privacy laws (GDPR) require healthcare and banking organizations to notify individuals if their personal data is compromised. This is often a time-consuming process and can incur significant fines. Organizations must also dedicate significant resources to incident response and system recovery, which leads to loss of productive time.