What is a Data Breach?
“A data breach is a confirmed incident in which confidential, sensitive or protected data has been accessed and/or disclosed in an unauthorized fashion.”
Data security breaches take less time than you think, but question is how long has it been in the works? As per IBM Data Breach report, it takes an average of 287 days to identify and contain a data breach.
Here are 4 significant consequences of data breaches
1. Revenue Loss –
A broken website, for example, may lead potential clients to look for alternatives. However, any outage in an IT system might cause work to be disrupted.
2. Brand Reputation Damage –
A breach impacts more than short-term revenue. What if your emails leaked out and you need those to remain private as they may have business client information, formulas to your product discussions, credit card info, internal systems information and more.
3. Intellectual Property Loss –
Losing intellectual property can impact business competitiveness. Competitors can take advantage of your information.
4. Hidden Costs –
Legal fees, insurance premium hikes and investigations now being spent more. Regulatory fines can be overlooked. In fact, Uber was fined $148 million for accounts breached. Instead of it being reported, the company paid the hacker $100,000 to keep it under wraps. Those actions by Uber cost them a larger fine for violation of state data breach notification laws.