Numerous incidents of data breaches have been happening more often than the previous years, and in the first half of the year 2019 the attackers have exposed 4.1 billion records in different data breach incidents across the world. As per the Risk-Based Security Research 2019 midyear report, the first six months of 2019 have witnessed more than 3800 incidents security breach which exposed 4.1 billion records. The most astounding fact about these 3800 data breach incidents, is out of the total 3800 data breaches only eight breaches exposed 3.2 billion of records from the total 4.1 billion exposed records. Out of the total exposed records, 70% of breaches were through email and 65% through passwords.
The above-mentioned data may be taken for granted by the small and medium businesses saying that the entire security breaches in 2019 were targeted to the big business houses and organizations. On the other hand, there are numerous incidents of security breaches among the small and medium business and organizations including 10000 or fewer numbers of exposed records. This further proves that small and medium businesses and organizations are more vulnerable to security breaches because they have less preventive measures and have inadequate security systems or lack of well-guarded data-store systems.
Eventually, businesses irrespective of their sizes and status should appropriately ensure security system as the report says that 84.6% exposed records through 67% of security breaches took place in the business sector involving both big as well as small and medium business groups. While talking about ensuring security, it is not always the high-level and complicated system of security but more important are the small and simple security measures such as taking care of multiple entry points and high volume of malicious activities of the attackers, ensuring security system by creating complex passwords, using MFA or Multi-Factor authentication, taking care of debit and credit cards while shopping, always be vigilant of fraudulent activities and identity theft, and ensuring setting up account alerts etc.
In addition to the above simple steps towards ensuring security, the business should also ensure advanced security systems such as getting back to info-security basics, security ensuring training and capacity building for the employees etc. The info-security basics are comprised of strategies which ensure the database and services free of misconfiguration. The misconfigured database and services are in fact vulnerabilities of a system opening ways for the attackers to get into your system. Similarly, the inefficiency of the employees is another vulnerability usually exploited by the attackers.
