With more businesses connected to the internet, most of the transactions take place online. Although a more connected world encourages business, it also creates a greater risk of the exploitation of sensitive information such as customer data.
Cybercriminals often take down websites, spread disinformation about companies, sell business plan forecasts and market analyses to competitors, and steal customer’s data. If a data breach causes the leakage of customers’ information, customers may decide to choose a competitor’s alternative that promises to offer them better security.
According to the University of Maryland, attackers launch an attack every 39 seconds on average, which is equivalent to 2,244 times a day.
What are the causes of a data breach?
Poor password policies and non-secure usernames give hackers more chances to cause a data breach. In addition to this, a lack of encryption for data-in-transit and data-in-rest also leads to vulnerabilities that cybercriminals may exploit.
Despite companies adopting the latest technologies to secure their data, hackers continue to attack organizations by conducting more sophisticated attacks that are hard to detect quickly. It might take weeks or even months for a business to detect that a data breach has occurred.
So, what happens when a data breach occurs?
A data breach can cause significant damage to an organization. For instance, a security breach may have short-term consequences such as investment of resources and conducting a forensic investigation to determine the cause of the breach.
How did the breach occur? Did it expose any sensitive information? What can be done to prevent such data breaches?
An insurance policy with a strong data breach response plan can effectively respond to all of these questions and help mitigate the scope of damage the breach can cause.
However, a data breach doesn’t stop here. It has severe long-term effects that can be detrimental to the company, its clients, employees, and third-party suppliers and providers.
One of the most severe long-term effects of a data breach is damage to the brand’s reputation. It is one of the most valuable assets that companies spend countless hours and millions of dollars building. With a single data breach, the brand’s reputation can tumble into ruins.
While the media announces the latest data breaches daily to consumers, the impact can often be long-lasting and wreak havoc on brands.
Here are some of the most common and severe long-term effects of a data breach that you should know:
Author Bio – Aaron Cure
Aaron Cure is the Principal Security Consultant at Cypress Data Defense and an instructor and contributing author for the Dev544 Secure Coding in .NET course.
After 10 years in the U.S. Army, I decided to switch my focus to developing security tools and performing secure code reviews, penetration testing, static source code analysis, and security research.
