FindItMore | In today’s digital age, accessing, acquiring, and storing information has become utterly easy. With the presence of the internet, almost everything is within reach in just one click. It enables us to learn and even earn from it. As the saying goes ‘information is power’.
However, not everyone uses this ‘power’ in the right way, making easy access to information both a blessing and a curse. This only means that there is no room for complacency, especially for businesses like yours.
According to ACLU (American Civil Liberties Union) advocate Ben Wizner, while modern technology makes collecting and storing large amounts of data feasible and convenient for corporations and governments, it also makes them and their clients vulnerable to privacy breaches that may lead to safety risks and identity frauds.
Falling victim to a data breach can lead to hard-hitting repercussions which will not only cost your business financially but also your brand reputation and your client’s trust. Once your clients agreed to your privacy policy, it means that they entrust their personal data to you. They trust that while you collect, store, use their personal information for business purposes, you are also using appropriate technical, organizational, and administrative security measures to protect it from misuse, unauthorized access, and alteration among others.
Failure to perform this responsibility due to human errors, hacking, inside jobs, lost or stolen devices, and poor security will result to loss of customers, damaged business reputation due to non-compliance from industry regulators – and in worse cases, large amounts of settlement expenditures resulting from litigation.
Indeed, no individual or organization of nature and scale is safe today from data breach. While the causes of data breach still remain the same, the damage that it can cause has become more aggravating these days. In fact most of the biggest and most damaging security breaches in history happened just in the last ten years. In 2017 alone, over 2.5 billion records were compromised in publicly disclosed data breaches. The industries with the highest breach incidents were health care, financial services education and government.
Having that said, even large companies and organizations are not exempted from cyber risks. In fact, a number of well-known corporations have already experienced the damaging effect of security breaches including the following:
- Home Depot
- Anthem
- JP Morgan Chase
- Heartland Payment Systems
- Equifax
- eBay
- Yahoo
To know more about the top security breaches in history, check out the infographic below from TeleMessage.
