The Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, in August 2010, published the latest Data Breaches Chronology. This is a piece that the number of sensitive records that have been breached since 2005. For all those records that have been breached, the most common personal sensitive data taken were the social security numbers, credit card information for the customers. The records also state that most of this information was derived from the merchants, retailers, and other non-insurance-related businesses, non-financial-related companies from merchants. Moreover, most of these businesses were small sized.
The same research also notes that more than 80 percent of these small businesses that experience data and information breaches often go bankrupt. Some of the lucky ones suffer severe financial losses that can only be recovered in a minimum of two years. For this reason, you must make yourself understand the havoc that can be caused by data breaches on small businesses.
What can small business enterprise owners do to have their data and information centers protected against breaches? The good news about this study is that protecting your business against some of these data breaches is often simpler than you can imagine. It is also less expensive than the financial, physical and emotional costs of repairing your business after a certain data or information breach.
Causes of Data Security Breaches
According to the Clearinghouse Privacy Rights, security breaches can result from one of the following:
- Unintended Disclosure: someone in or out of the affiliation with the organization or business can gain access to the sensitive or private customer or company information on the website, fax letter, or email.
- Hacking or Malware: unauthorized individuals can also gain access to your servers or computers. This is often done through the weak passwords or the firewalls to corrupt or steal data using the malware programs.
- Payment Card Fraud: This card information can be stolen from the payment terminal or the point-of-sale service credit cards.
- Bad Employees: Someone working in your business or company can decide to leak information or steal it intentionally.
- Stolen computer servers can be accessed by your components to gain market or information advantage over your business or company.
- Stolen, discarded, or lost paper documents
Ways to Protect Against Data Security Threats
Protecting your company or small business against the security breach is never about practicing safe. However, it is all about hiring the right person or putting in place a good security policy. You can protect confidential or sensitive data in the following ways. You can visit to find out more here.
- Encrypt sensitive data: when your data is mobile. Encrypting it makes it safer. For this reason, segregate it from your network and data center.
- Identify the sensitive information you have, where it resides, and its use. Transfer the information to other parts of computers.
- Segregate/isolate sensitive data. Always try to keep the most sensitive company or business information in other separate computers or servers. If you have fewer copies of that information, you will make it safer.
In the end, it is good to understand that it is often much expensive to fix a problem than preventing it.
