How to Secure a Data Leak Before It Becomes a Major Breach

Speedy Detection is Key to Securing Data Leaks

When a data leak hits a hacker’s radar, it can become a costly data breach. Once a data leak occurs, the best way to secure it is to detect and resolve before it becomes a major breach.

What’s the difference between a data leak and a data breach? 

• A data leak is when digital data — often of a sensitive or confidential nature — is publicly available to unauthorized persons, often inadvertently. 
• A data breach occurs when an unauthorized entity accesses critical data, most often for nefarious purposes.

Data Leak Sources 

A common sources of data leaks occurs when companies store data in the cloud on third-party sites. Reporters often site misconfigured S3 buckets as a common data leak source, making AWS a favorite target among cyber attackers.  Given the rapid adoption of cloud storage, companies have sought out an enterprise-grade digital risk platform to protect their data in a cloud environment by detecting data leaks on third-party sites. This knowledge empowers businesses to stop data leaks from becoming a major breaches. In the cloud, data leaks are inevitable, and data breaches are costly.  The average cost of a data breach is $3.9 million dollars, as reported in the 2020 Ponemon Report of the Cost of Insider Threats Globally.  With the cost for data breach that high, how many data breaches can your enterprise afford?  Keep in mind that a data breach stays undetected on average for 280 days, giving hackers plenty of time to investigate a network and find data worth exploiting. 

Data breaches

You only need to open a digital magazine to see examples of a data breach. 

• MGM originally reported 5.2 million guests’ information was breached in February 2020, but the latest reports put the number of guests at 142 million.
• In April, 500,000 Zoom credentials were for sale on the dark web. With supply so plentiful, passwords were available for the equivalent of a penny. 
• Magellan Health, a Fortune 500 company reported a data breach in April 2020, which impacted 365,000 patients. 

Cyber attackers search for the easiest way to gain unauthorized access to misconfigured connected storage devices, open databases or cloud ecosystems to steal the most valuable confidential business information, such as financial reports, intellectual property, and personally identifiable information (PII) of a company’s customers and their financial data.

Stop data leaks from becoming breaches

Forward-thinking board members and executives deploy digital risk protection that immediately alerts the enterprise should they experience a data leak. This is particularly critical in a third-party environment, when the leak is beyond the business’ security controls. In other cases, companies search for digital risk protection after losing data from a cyber attack and are resolved to prevent another data breach on a third-party storage site they do not manage. To survive in a chaotic market, companies must adapt to changing business conditions.  At CybelAngel, it is our business to understand changing computing conditions that affect the threat landscape.   A changing threat landscape is but one reason why CybelAngel’s digital risk platform uses machine learning and human ingenuity to identify where data is leaking, anywhere on the internet 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.   If you are still doing cybersecurity without machine learning, you should think again. Data leak detection is powered by machine learning models.  

Do you know your company’s exposure risk to data leaks? 

Find out today with a free data leak assessment from CybelAngel.  Identifying the extent of your data leaks is the first step to operating safely in today’s complex computing environment.  Because data leaks are inevitable; but damage is optional.