What’s the Difference Between a Data Breach and Security Incident?

If you think a data breach can’t happen to you, think again: According to the Ponemon Institute’s Fifth Annual Benchmark Study on Privacy and Security of Healthcare Data, criminal attacks are up 125 percent compared to five years ago. And that’s just in the healthcare sector. Now more than ever, organizations need a primer on how to protect sensitive data. With cybercrime attacks on the rise, it’s critical to understand what a data breach is, how it differs from a security incident and how to plan a data breach response.

Incident vs. Data Breach

 

Think of a security incident as a pesky cold that may sideline you for a couple days, but clears up fairly quickly. It’s any event that violates an organization’s security or privacy policies around sensitive information like Social Security numbers or confidential medical records. This can be anything from a misplaced drive to missing paper files. A data breach, on the other hand, is like the nastiest flu bug ever — a whopper of a virus that will knock you off your feet.  The folks at ID Experts define it as a security incident that meets specific legal definitions per state and federal laws. Specifically, data breaches require notification to the affected individuals, regulatory agencies, and sometimes credit reporting agencies and media.

 

Security Incidents Are Status Quo

 

Security incidents are, sadly, part of the status quo — with 65 percent of healthcare organizations reporting having experienced electronic information-based security incidents over the past two years, according to the Ponemon study. While not all cybersecurity incidents escalate into data breaches, there’s a regulatory obligation to complete an incident risk assessment when PHI (protected health information) or PII (personally identifiable information) is compromised.

 

Responding Effectively

 

When an incident does escalate into a data breach, a quick and effective response is critical. This requires close collaboration across the company or organization, not just IT security. Stakeholders in legal, marketing, public relations, the C-Suite and other functions have to be prepared to own a piece of the incident response and work together in a fairly seamless manner.

The first two, vital steps following a data breach are 1) Quantify the damage; and 2) Determine your response. To address the first, quantifying damage, it helps to know at any point in time what information requires the most protection, where it’s stored and how it’s protected. At SpartanTec, Inc. in Fayetteville NC we recommend performing periodic cyber threat assessments to develop this understanding for:

• managing enterprise risk
• quell fears, especially when the breach is more serious than initially thought
• credit monitoring isn’t enough
• media interest is high.
• It requires data breach agility.

Organizations with high data breach agility are more likely to have cybersecurity platforms that optimize visibility and the sharing of actionable threat intelligence between prevention and detection tools and across endpoints, data centers and the cloud.

This is one of the advantages of the security fabric. Based on open APIs, it links together different security sensors and tools to collect real threat data, enabling technology and people to more effectively coordinate and respond to potential threats.

To ensure your company’s data is secure, Contact the team at SpartanTec, Inc. to learn more.

SpartanTec, Inc.
Fayetteville, NC 28304
(910) 745-7776
http://manageditservicesfayetteville.com

Serving: Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Columbia, Wilmington, Fayetteville, Florence, Charleston

Payment Forms Cause Large Amount Of Online Data Breaches

When surveying the state of your company's security, it's important to understand what your biggest risks are, including data breach.

According to the 2019 Application Report published by F5 Labs, the answer is simple.
Fully 71 percent of all web-related data breaches in 2018 specifically targeted customers' financial information.

The single biggest culprit?  Formjacking.  According to F5's Senior Threat Evangelist, Davidd Warburton, formjacking attacks in the hacking community have exploded in popularity over the last two years.

A big part of the problem arises from the fact that most businesses have outsourced their shopping cart and credit card payment systems to third party vendors.  Developers make use of imported code libraries, and in some cases, access third party scripts hosted on the web.

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This has the advantage of saving companies money, but it simultaneously puts them in an awkward, vulnerable position. The majority of the code used to handle and process sensitive customer information exists outside the purview of IT security.  Companies simply have no way of controlling the code or verifying its safety.

Worse, cybersecurity hackers know that since most companies use the same small group of payment processing options, all they have to do is compromise a single component of one of those systems and they have access to a vast pool of information that spans multiple companies.

This is exactly how and why Magecart attacks have become so devastatingly effective, and it explains their meteoric rise in popularity.

Challenges Businesses Face For Data Breach

"Adequately detecting and mitigating injection flaws now depends on adapting assessments and controls - not just fixing code.  The more code we hand over to third parties, the less visibility and less control we have over it."

Unfortunately, there's no simple fix for that.  Companies are driven by necessity to seek the lowest cost solution.  It would be ruinously expensive for each company to create, manage and maintain their own custom payment processing solutions. But businesses always have the option to seek out IT services to help them boost their company's network security.

Make sure that your payment processing solutions are free from vulnerabilities. Call SpartanTec, Inc. in Fayetteville now. Let our team help you secure your business and lower your risk of experiencing online breach.

SpartanTec, Inc.
Fayetteville, NC 28304
(910) 745-7776
http://manageditservicesfayetteville.com

Serving: Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Columbia, Wilmington, Fayetteville, Florence