Having covered the start-up vs corporate question before, we thought we would look into which industry is currently most at risk of cyber attack. According to the Wikipedia entry ‘list of data breaches’, which contains a list of data breaches (spoilers), out of 255 data breaches over the last 15 years, historically, the hardest hit industry was ‘web’.
With over 80 million players globally, Fortnite stands out as an undisputed champion when it comes to online gaming. Fortnite has been developed by Epic Games, an American game developer. However, it seems that the same cannot be said for Epic Games when it comes to security and protection of user data. Fortnite accounts for around 50% of Epic Games’ estimated value of $8.5 billion.
Cybersecurity is a continuous phenomenon. New countless threats emerge every day and cybersecurity analysts continually develop a fast, reliable, and sophisticated techniques to thwart these notorious threats in order to prevent financial loss and reputational damage. According to the Analysts, like the previous year (2018), 2019 will also witness the increase in data breaches.
In mid-November last year, the retail giant Target experienced a security breach where customers’ credit card information was stolen. At first, it was thought that 40 million users had been affected but by January 2014, those numbers skyrocketed to a stunning 100 million. What emerged was the story of hackers who had appeared as “the good guys” in order to harvest as much information as they could from Target’s network.
A security breach is defined as any unauthorized access or acquisition that compromises the security, confidentiality, integrity or availability of covered information, systems, and applications. Recent years have seen significant amounts of legislative activity related to state data breach notification laws. South Dakota and Alabama enacted new data breach notification laws in 2019, becoming the last of 50 U.S. states to enact such laws.
A US energy company, identified by some media sources as Duke Energy, recently received a $10 million fine from the North American Electric Reliability Corp. for repeated violations of critical infrastructure protection (CIP) reliability standards.
The likelihood that your organization will suffer a material data breach in the next 2 years is nearly 28%, and that’s higher than last year’s risk according to The Ponemon Institute’s 2018 Cost of a Data Breach Study: Global Overview. Counsel’s best strategy is to insist on a strong organizational plan to quickly and effectively respond to data breaches and, ultimately, prevent them in the future.
France’s national data protection authority (CNIL — Commission Nationale de l’informatique et des Libertés) ordered its first sanction under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, or as commonly called as the GDPR. In this sanction, the CNIL fined Google a whopping €50 million because of Google’s failure to comply with the GDPR provisions when a user sets up his new Android phone and follows the subsequent process.
Breaches aren’t easy to deal with, especially if you are of the opinion that companies are people too. Having seen, been part of, and lent a shoulder to many a breach, here are nine of the common ways companies respond to breaches.
Recent findings report that on average, 96 percent of systems across all industry segments have been breached. While you should absolutely update your information security system and protocols to provide the best protection you can for your data, you should also know how to spot a data breach. Unfortunately the odds of escaping one aren’t in your favor, but you can increase your chances of spotting a breach quickly and containing any damage.
