Description
In July 30th, 2019, Equifax suffered a large data breach that affected over 100 million people, 140,000 social security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers.
With the development of technology, and the rapid growth of data volume, now bad guys can trade private information for a considerable amount of money, so protecting the asset and avoiding security breaches is more and more important.
Security breach means when someone bypasses the computer's security mechanism somehow, get access illegally of data, system, service, applications, networks, and devices, which may endanger the confidentiality, integrity, and sometimes availability.
A security breach happens all the time, not just to individuals, but to businesses and even governments. Due to the increasing value of information, hackers pay more attention to attack systems with sensitive and confidential data. Assets, such as personal information, banking information, location, sensitive or confidential information in enterprises and governments, are easier to breach. Also, internet service suppliers, such as social media, online job sites, dating sites, e-commerce sites and so on, public service agencies, such as banks and hospitals, and even governments are more likely to be the target for hackers.
Many reasons are leading to security breaches. For enterprises, the bad management, such as awful server configuration due to system administrators’ inexperience, have been the No.1 reason for security breaches. Apart from that, system flaws, malicious codes and crack also can be reasons for a security breach.
There are some differences between security breaches and data breaches. Firstly, security breaches include data breaches in most cases. For example, Security breaches happen when the systems are invaded illegally, but after getting unauthorized access of the system, hackers can not only get data but attack vulnerabilities to make systems crash as well. Secondly, there is a sequence between security breaches and data breaches sometimes. A security breach happens first, then a data breach might happen. But there are exceptions. For example, when corporate spies maliciously leak confidential company data, a data breach happens first.
Importance
The reason for choosing security breaches as my blog topic is that a security breach everywhere, not just to individuals, but to businesses and even governments, which will cost a large amount of money and cause irreversible damage to assets because you cannot delete people’s memory. As a result, we have to know what a security breach is, what kind of data is more likely to be breached, what factors can cause a security breach, and most important, what actions can be taken to mitigate the risk of a security breach.
Takeaways
Security breaches are scary, so we need to take actions to protect data. First, for individuals, remember to upgrade system and installed the software in time to avoid hackers taking advantage of known vulnerabilities to attack systems. Besides, changing data periodically, being more vigilant about clicking suspicious links, monitoring your credit balances carefully will also be helpful to decrease the risk of security breaches. For enterprises and government, optimizing management workflows, inviting experts to do penetration tests periodically, increasing employee training will mitigate the possibility of security breaches.
Sources
https://www.techopedia.com/definition/29060/security-breach
https://us.norton.com/internetsecurity-privacy-security-breach.html