By Dipesh Kaura, General Manager, Kaspersky (South Asia)
“India has seen numerous instances of organizations becoming a victim of a data breach incident in the recent few years. These data leak incidents took place due to many factors and not just because of the lack of security at the organization’s end. It is important for businesses to understand the factors that can cause a data breach in order to be fully prepared to prevent an incident, or mitigate the risks caused by it. Businesses who are a victim of a data breach today not only are responsible to protect their consumer’s data, but also prevent it from being misused by the cybercriminals as an aftermath of a data breach.
Anyone can be at risk of a data breach — from individuals to high-level enterprises and governments. More importantly, anyone can put others at risk if they are not protected. In general, data breaches happen due to weaknesses in: Technology and User behavior. While enterprises build a robust security infrastructure for their networks, they often fail to protect themselves from the two other equally important aspects: Human error and third party services/ providers. The weaknesses in technology can be either at the organization’s end or it can be a security flaw of the third party/ supply chain provider of an organization.
Human being the weakest link in the cybersecurity ecosystem, it also becomes essential for enterprises to regularly train their non-IT staff and create an awareness amongst them in order to protect their consumer’s data from being exposed in a data breach incident due to threats like phishing, malware and brute force attacks. Regular system updates and proactive disclosure of such incidents also help businesses in creating a stronger strategy to fight against data breaches”.