The theft of data is so prevalent, so orchestrated and serious, it requires technology that is just as quick and equal to the task of providing effective protection. Because theft is automated, the security should also be automated say executives from Redstor, a specialist data management and security company.
Data theft is lucrative business and according to data security analysis by Gemalto and findings for 2015 of the Breach Level Index (BLI), ‘malicious outsiders’ are the number one cause (58% of all cases).
“Without automated data protection, the speed and variety at which data breaches occur is simply unmanageable,” said Danie Marais, Director of Product Management at Redstor.
Marais says the company is not over-stating the severity of the cybercrime onslaught. Businesses of all sizes and focus are at risk of increasing threats being perpetrated by external cybercriminals, including malware and ransomware.
But what about the influence of hacktivists, ‘accidental loss’ through negligence, as well as identity theft, asks Marais.
“Well meaning hacktivists cause 2% of data breaches. Interestingly enough, ‘accidental loss’ is the second-most prevalent cause with 24%! It’s debatable how many accidents are actually caused by negligence,” he said.
“The BLI shows how 2015 was the year that data breaches ‘got personal’. Identity theft became the most prominent type of data breach in the world – 53% in fact – next to stealing credit card data and financial information,” Marais continues.
Redstor explains that identity theft is a vast topic and has many sources and numerous methods cybercriminals use to accomplish: from the manual efforts of social engineering and phishing, to more elaborate automated schemes like ransomware and malware botnets.
To safeguard against such an extremely robust enemy, the data protection needs to be threefold,” says Marais.
This protection involves addressing the human element by completing simple tasks like increasing browser security settings, ensure automation using more elaborate techniques like shutting down C&C servers, and, of course, always factoring in data backups.
“To be effective, these backups need to be scheduled to automatically run at regular intervals. And if your backups aren’t cloud-based, it is preferable that all data is mirrored to some form of off-site storage for redundancy. This will also help protect your data should the network be infected,” Marais adds.
