Why Your Business’s Sensitive Data is More Vulnerable than You Think

Data security is becoming a more significant concern than ever before. A record number of data breaches occurred in 2021. Many people expected 2020 to have the most cyberattacks ever because many hackers were taking advantage of vulnerabilities caused by the pandemic. However, the number of cyberattacks only increased to 1,291 last year.

The number of cyberattacks is not likely to stop growing anytime soon. As a result, businesses need to take sensible measures to prevent them.

Unfortunately, business data is a lot more vulnerable than many of us think. You might think that the precautions you have taken are sufficient, but a hacker could quickly uncover weaknesses.

You need to be proactive to prevent cyberattacks. This means recognizing weak points in your business security model and shoring them up, such as by using WipeDrive data erasure software.

Educating yourself about the weak points in your digital security model

There are a lot of risks that could leave your business vulnerable to a cyberattack. You will have an easier time preventing a data breach if you are aware of these risk factors. Some of the most significant risks are listed below.

Remnants of data is still on old devices.

When you are coming up with a cybersecurity policy, you are probably more concerned about your most recent data. You might not think as much about data that has been archived. You might also feel that any data that has been deleted is gone for good.

Unfortunately, any data that has ever been stored on your devices could be compromised if it is possible to be recovered. In addition, hackers that get access to your devices might be able to steal existing data from them.

You can’t assume that data on your old devices is safe after being deleted. The truth is that deleting data doesn’t wipe it out of existence. It merely marks the storage space to be overwritten when your device needs to store new data. The data can often be recovered unless it has been overwritten multiple times.

If you have old data you don’t want to be recovered, then you need to use a reliable data erasure tool. These tools can overwrite the data enough times to be safe from being recovered.

Employees are not trained to deal with social engineering.

If you have watched older hacker movies like War Games and Hackers, you probably think that most cyberattacks are orchestrated entirely with brute force methodologies. Unfortunately, that is not the case in real life. Around 98% of cyberattacks rely on social engineering.

One of the biggest reasons social engineering is effective is that employees are not trained to deal with it. As a result, they can easily be duped by somebody tricking them into downloading malware or impersonating somebody they trust for sensitive information.

Your employees need to be educated about the role of social engineering in cybersecurity. This will significantly reduce the risk of a data breach.

Networks that are not monitored carefully are most at risk.

Another significant cybersecurity risk is unmonitored networks. You might have multiple networks within your organization. It is easy to pay close attention to those most frequently used. Unfortunately, hackers could potentially use any of them to gain access to sensitive information.

You must make sure that all of your networks are monitored as carefully as possible. In addition, you need to take stringent measures to shut down any potential source of a cyberattack.

Setting administrator privileges too liberally is asking for trouble.

You’re going to have a lot of different people using your databases, networks, and other resources. So, when you are managing your networks, you’re going to have to assign varying privilege levels to your users.

It is easy to be careless when making these decisions. If you don’t have a background in cybersecurity, you might not recognize the risk of giving a lot of privileges to most people within your network.

Unfortunately, this can create all kinds of complications. For example, a rogue employee could share resources with hackers. Since many cyber-attacks involve inside jobs, this is a big problem if those employees have a lot of network privileges. Another issue is that a hacker could control an account and use it to access the rest of the network. Again, this will be a big problem with that account having a lot of privileges for accessing and editing data.

You need to be conservative when assigning user privileges to people on your network.

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Interesting Related Article: “How to Protect Your Business’ Data in an Era of Tight Regulation“