Breadth Vs. Depth: The Cybersecurity Industry Has Been Focusing On The Wrong Thing

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Certainly, each organization wants to keep its name out of the carousel of data breach holders. And it is that a data breach entails significant sanctions, which include fines from the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), diminished reputation, cost of forensic analysis and cost of corrective actions.

The average cost of a data breach worldwide is $ 3.92 million, while the average cost of a data breach in the United States is $ 8.19 million.

The cybersecurity industry’s approach to data protection has only solved the depth of security issues. There is data loss prevention (DLP), information rights management (IRM), encryption and many available solutions that can only protect a few data well. In this way, it is appropriate to bring up a sample of data breaches.

Sample massive data breaches in 2019

• WhatsApp: a software error allowed hackers to access the user content of one billion users.
• Facebook: the social media giant has had multiple cases, totaling more than one billion users: 60,000 user passwords stored in the plain text were accessible by 20,000 employees; 540 million PII records held by third-party applications were available to the public; 419 million Facebook user records were left on an unprotected server.
• Verifications.io: Almost one billion email accounts with PII were left on an unprotected server.
• First American Financial Corp: 885 million personal and financial records were left on an unprotected website.
• Zynga: a hacker gained access to 218 million user accounts.

It should be noted that all these infractions have family histories. A phishing attack can lead to stolen credentials, which leads to unauthorized access to files and database servers. Unprotected online servers, databases or Amazon S3 packages allow massive data leaks.

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Source: Jeff Capone | Forbes