How to prevent Data Breach？

Preparedness and Proactivity are the keys to stopping this growing menace. More energy and efforts are put into cleaning up the mess, after a breach has occurred, than planning for the breach and having a quick response system in advance. Everyone should have an incident response plan to control the situation during a breach. It helps in controlling actions and communication, and ultimately lessen the impact of a breach.

A vast majority of the data breach incidents can be stopped by resorting to an approach of a layered defense. This approach to network security ensures, if an attacker manages to penetrate one layer of defense, he is immediately stopped by a subsequent layer. How is this done? By reducing the Attack Surface.

Attack Surface

The term denotes the total sum of the vulnerabilities in each computing device or network that are accessible to a hacker. Anyone attempting to break into a system begins mainly by scanning the target’s attack surface for possible attack vectors (whether for an active attack or passive attack). So, the first step in the strengthening of the defense is to close unnecessarily open ports and limit the resources that are available to untrusted users through MAC address filtering.

Reducing Vulnerability to Phishing Attacks

Phishing is one of the most widely used methods of identity theft. One can stay safe and avoid falling prey to it by keeping a check on simple things like, staying alerted of emails that come from unrecognized senders, emails that aren’t personalized and emails that ask you to confirm personal or financial information over the Internet and make urgent requests for this information.

Besides these, a number of industry guidelines and government compliance regulations mandate strict governance of sensitive or personal data to avoid data breaches. Countries, where such a framework is absent or weak, should adopt robust laws to protect consumers.