LERTR: Advancing Data Breach Detection
Organizations need intelligent security practices and cyber habits if they want to mitigate potential damages through early data breach detection.
As threat actors continuously challenge the cyber defences of organizations, companies are increasingly forced to focus on improving cybersecurity practices. However, even the best cybersecurity teams with the largest budgets find it hard to stay ahead of the evolving threat landscape. And with more technology in use, a growing reliance on cloud storage and the Internet of Things (IoT), there is a growing potential for sensitive data to be exposed to threats.
As such it’s unsurprising that data breaches, in spite of increased cybersecurity spending, are becoming more common and more expensive to deal with. Employees need intelligent security practices and cyber habits and companies need to be armed with the latest technology and tools for early data breach detection to gain the upper hand when combatting this ever-changing threat.
Data Breaches Need to be Caught Early
The average cost of a data breach in 2020 according to the IBM / Ponemon Institute report was $3.86 million. However, there are plenty of examples where the costs have vastly exceeded this average, escalating into the hundreds of millions or even billions. For example, the Equifax data breach in 2017 cost Equifax $1.7 billion in the end. Another high profile example, Facebook eventually settled on a fine of $5 billion after it’s ‘privacy misstep’ involving Cambridge Analytica. This bill doesn’t include the additional costs and expenses that Facebook has accrued in the development and expansion of their cybersecurity and privacy departments nor does it account for the reputational damage it suffered.
While costs of these extremes are rare, data breaches in general are not. The IBM report goes on to analyse particular subsets of the data noting that the worst impacted is healthcare with an average data breach cost exceeding $7 million. And that the average time taken for an organization to identify and contain a data breach, was an astonishing 280 days, over 9 months. This is in spite of significant evidence that the speed of containment has a significant impact on the overall data beach cost, which if left unchecked can linger for years after the incident.
How to Prevent Data Breaches
As with many of these things prevention is often the best policy.
Data Breach Prevention #1: Have Clear Security Protocols
Every employee should know, understand and be able to abide by strict security protocols to keep company data secure and thwart social engineering tactics. Having protocols is one of the best ways to help prevent data theft by ensuring unauthorized personnel do not have access to data.
Data Breach Prevention #2: Safeguard Against Human Error
Many data breaches are the result of an employee error. This could be anything from downloading a document off of an illegitimate website, social engineering tactics or even outright blackmail. Employees should only have access to the information that is vital to their particular roles within the company. Those with higher level access should accordingly have higher levels of cyber security training and understanding.
Data Breach Prevention #3: Improved Password Protection
Having strong unique passwords is the first line of defence against any cyberattack. However, nobody, whether they are a high level executive not, is going to be able to remember a dozen or more 12 character passwords that use special characters, letters and numbers. Make sure that 2FA is enabled on all logins, and use a password manager (with 2FA enabled) to auto generate and save complex passwords and ensure the highest levels of password security are enabled.
Data Breach Prevention #4: Update Security Software Regularly
Companies should utilize a high quality antivirus software, anti-spyware program and firewall. Additionally, these programs should be regularly updated to keep them free from vulnerabilities.
Data Breach Prevention #5:OSINT for Dark Web Forums
By monitoring dark web forums and other chat rooms you can learn of planned attacks, potential exploits and even find exploit kits being sold online. This will give you a good indication of the access methods which have been discovered allowing you to implement a patch quickly to prevent it.
The Tools for Early Detection of Data Breaches: LERTR
Having the right tools is vital if an organization wants to prevent or mitigate the threat of data breaches. Using an OSINT platform like Signal allows security teams to efficiently monitor the surface, deep, and dark web for details or indications of potential and past data beaches. For example, you might find exploit kits targeting a vulnerability specific to your company. This would allow you to prepare a patch for this vulnerability before it was exploited.
Additionally, hackers might discuss strategies or plans around an upcoming data breach attempt on a dark web forum. Forewarned, you have a better chance of catching and preventing the attempt. However, prevention isn’t always possible. For those scenarios where you do face a data breach you want to discover it as quickly as possible to mitigate the potential damage and limit the costs.
To this end we have integrated with Webhose to advance our early data breach detection capabilities. Additionally, we have launched LERTR, a cyber specific OSINT platform. aa
Automate Intelligence
With powerful tools at hand you can spend less time searching data and more time planning and implementing responses.
Be the first to Know
Defend against future attacks with relevant actionable intel. And be the first to know about compromised data, control damages.
Better Risk Protection
With improved risk protection you will be the first to know if an event that threatens your brand occurs enabling you to stay ahead.
Final Words
Data breaches are increasingly common and expensive. Effective preventative measures need to be put in place and maintained to limit threats. However, even the best defences can fall to a determined threat actor. As such organizations needs to ensure they have all the tools to not only prevent, but also to detect early and contain data breaches quickly should one occur.
Signal is a powerful OSINT tool which allows users to create searches using boolean logic enhanced with NLP, with which security teams can efficiently monitor online activity to detect threats as or even before they emerge.
The Increasing Risks and Rising Costs of Data Breaches
The average cost of a data breach is estimated to be over $3million USD and rising. As such it’s never been more important for organizations to have the tools and processes to mitigate the threat of a data breach.
Data Breaches Aren’t Uncommon
It’s not just small companies with limited security budgets that have exploitable cyber gaps. Often, in fact, large organizations become targets because of the amount and nature of the data that they hold. Organizations in the healthcare sector, for example, have proven time and again to be a popular targets for cybercriminals.
Another example of a large organization being targeted is Experian. Experian experienced a major data breach in August 2020 where over 24 million records were exposed. The attackers impersonated a client and were able to request and obtain confidential data. Experian claimed that no customer banking information was exposed. Even so, personal information like this could be used in a targeted social engineering strategy to then get Experian customers to reveal further sensitive information such as their banking details.
This isn’t the first major data breach that Experian has had. Back in 2015, 15 million North American customers and applicants had their personal data, including Social Security numbers and ID details, stolen. Perhaps because of this prior experience, Experian understands the risks and are adept at dealing with cyber breaches. They claim that the attacker’s hardware has already been seized and the collected data secured and deleted.
How Much Does the Average Data Breach Cost?
The answer to this question varies between country and is additionally dependent on the sector but in general, can span anywhere from $1.25 million to $8.19 million.
According to the 2020 report from IBM and the Ponemon Institute the average cost of a data breach in 2020 is down 1.5% since 2019 and cost around $3.58 million USD. This works out to be around $150 per record and is a 10% rise over the last 5 years. The report analyzes recent breaches at more than 500 organizations to spot trends and developments in security risks and best practices.
The cost estimate includes a combination of direct and indirect costs related to time and effort in dealing with a breach, lost opportunities such as customer churn as a result of bad publicity, and regulatory fines. Though the average cost of a breach is relatively unchanged, IBM says the costs are getting smaller for prepared companies and much larger for those that don’t take any precautions.
Interestingly, various industries including healthcare appear to be more susceptible targets for attackers. According to the report, healthcare breaches cost organizations $6.45 million per breach, a number that eclipses all other sectors and makes it the ninth year in a row that healthcare organizations have had the highest costs associated with a data breach.
The average cost for per breached healthcare record ($429) is more than double any other industry too and substantially higher than the average, $150, according to the report. Healthcare breaches can often take the longest to identify (up to 236 days) as well.
Data Breaches are Happening all the Time
Data breaches are occurring constantly. Records from large brands with big security budgets and teams as well as much smaller organizations. It’s important that everyone understand the importance of secure digital practices and explores strategies for educating staff to reduce the risk of social engineering tactics.
How do Data Breaches Occur?
Hackers use various strategies to gain access to data. For example, with Experian the attacker leveraged human weakness through social engineering to persuade an employee to give them the data. Other strategies could be exploiting weaknesses such as a misconfigured or unsecured cloud storage. Alternatively a data breach could be the result of a malicious malware or ransomware.
According to the IBM/Ponemon report around 40% of all incidents were actually due to either cloud misconfigurations or stolen login details. Because of this IBM has urged companies to reexamine their authentication protocol to ensure 2FA is active.
A final note on the ascertaining of data by attackers is around state-sponsored attacks. State-sponsored attacks only make up around 13% of the overall number of attacks according to the report. However, with an average associated cost of around $4.43 million it’s clear that these types of attacks tend to target high-value data and this results in a more extensive compromise of victims' environments.
The energy sector, commonly targeted by nation-states, saw a 14% increase in breach costs when compared to the prior-year period, with an average breach cost of $6.39 million.
How can Organisations Reduce the Cost of Data Breaches?
“The average time to identify and contain a data breach, or the "breach lifecycle," was 280 days in 2020. Speed of containment can significantly impact breach costs, which can linger for years after the incident.” - Source
By having mitigation measures in place IBM/Ponemon estimate companies can reduce the cost of a breach by an average of $720,000.
According to their report those companies which had automated technologies deployed experienced around half the cost of a breach ($2.65 million on average) compared to those that did not have these technologies deployed ($5.16 million average).
Security response times were also reported to be ‘significantly shorter’ for companies with fully deployed security automation – these companies are as much as 27% faster than their counterparts at responding to breaches.
Security tools like OSINT platforms not only enable a faster breach response but a significantly more cost-efficient one as well, which as the security professional shortage persists is of absolute importance.
Signal OSINT platform gives you hyper-relevant real time alerts from surface, deep, and dark web sources.
Final Thoughts
With our increasing levels of digitisation, our growing reliance on the cloud, and the complexity of security systems paired with human error there are more attack vectors than ever before for hackers to exploit.
A data breach could involve anything from publicly available data being scraped and sold off to spammers, to online banking and credit card information being stolen. The longer a data breach goes undetected the longer the threat actors have to utilize this data causing more harm as time goes on.
Having the right tools and processes in place will allow you to detect data breaches early or even prevent a data breach from happening in the first place. With the steadily rising cost associated with data breaches, this could save an organization millions in the long run.