June 14th, 2010 | 
Author: Study Reveals Large Sum Of Data Infiltrations Discovered Too Late
A new investigation revealed that most companies only new about data breaches on their network after the data have been compromised. And they only found out about it after several months.
For the last for years 500 forensic investigations were conducted together with roughly 230 million records that belonged to several industries which include food and beverage retail financial services and technology services data breaches investigations made by Verizon Business.
It showed that of the entire data breaches resulted to compromised data in just a few days. And 63 of the companies are not aware of the data breaches after months when their data has already been compromised. What is more alarming is that 70 of the entire data breaches are determined by third parties like customers or banks that if they were not informed by these parties the companies will never know about it.
Even if the data breaches were discovered it will take weeks or months to fix the damages done to almost half of the compromised data while 37 of the data can be fixed in a few hours or days.
Majority of enterprise breaches around 73 to be exact originates from external sources while 18 originates from internal sources. Even if internal data breach rarely happens it results to heavier damage comparing it to external data breaches. During an internal data breach there are around 375000 records compromised while in external data breaches there are only 30000 records involved which according to the investigations.
Hacking is the most wellknown technique in data breaches that is 59 of all the recorded data breaches. In the service or application layer 39 of the breach happens at the platform or operating system layer 23 of the breach happens. The study showed that 18 of the entire hacks take advantage of known data vulnerabilities. Ninetenths of the data vulnerabilities had patches available for 6 months preceding the data breach.
The study outlined different ways for companies and organizations to protect themselves from future data breaches and it does not require advanced technologies to do it. The study suggested that companies should make sure that they implement their security policies strictly. The network attacks comprising of 83 are not that hard to prevent and opportunistic attacks are comprised of 85 which does not target a particular entity instead it is randomly executed via methods like phishing.
The study also showed that evidence of the data breaches comprising of 82 is accessible to thevictims but the evidence is not noted or no actions are taken. The study suggests that they implement the essentials of data security which includes:
a. constantly monitoring data logs
b.create plan for dataretention before taking actions against sophisticated malware or hacking attacks.
Peter Tippett Verizon Business Security Solutions research and intelligence vice president stated that security breaches and the compromise of important data are the main and real concerns of organizations and companies worldwide. He also added that this study will assist companies to better understand data breaches and to improve security.
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