Capital One Data Breach Highlights Need for Supply Chain Security
… fleeting consumer trust, she said.
“With this breach in particular, small business owners were one of the primary groups affected, so this reminds us that businesses of all sizes must always remain actively involved in proactively securing their digital assets and identity,” she said. “With every breach there are a number of lessons to be learned for MSSPs and cybersecurity providers. Above all, breaches indicate the importance of being proactive about security. Businesses can prevent attacks like this by consulting with their cloud-hosting provider on what they can do to secure their cloud server. While providers offer out-of-the-box security tools and configurations, it’s important for businesses to know where the security ends [and] their responsibility begins. When it comes to protecting sensitive data, encryption is a priority a business must keep in mind when protecting consumer data.”
According to a new study by IBM Security, the cost of a data breach has risen 12% over the past five years and now costs $3.92 million on average. These rising expenses are representative of the multiyear financial impact of breaches, increased regulation and the complex process of resolving criminal attacks.
The financial consequences of a data breach can be particularly acute for SMBs. In the study, companies with less than 500 employees suffered losses of more than $2.5 million on average — a potentially crippling amount for small businesses, which typically earn $50 million or less in annual revenue.
Cataldo said the following recommendations can go a long way toward helping organizations mitigate breaches of a similar nature:
- Set up a method or medium that allows responsible disclosure of breaches or vulnerabilities (CapitalOne had this mechanism in place).
- Have configuration validation and continued assessment of security controls for all security tools.
- Work with cloud providers when necessary to ensure relevant logging is enabled for your infrastructure.
- Categorize data in the cloud and employ data leak prevention solutions.
- Conduct a configuration review of your infrastructure, especially where sensitive data resides and align them with security best practices.
- Enable automated alerts upon unauthorized changes in the settings from the system baseline configuration.
- Enforce multifactor authentication (MFA) for administrative accounts.
- Use threat data feeds to block network connections originating from malicious network addresses or from known TOR/VPN exit nodes.
- Use a dedicated security product for cloud protection that detects threat activity inside the cloud environment.
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