Consequences of Data Breaches

As soon as your data is leaked, you’re suddenly put at risk for financial loss, identity theft, and as a business, loss of sales, reputation, intentional attacks. When any company that keeps personal information experiences a data breach, sensitive information including social security numbers, bank information, or credit card numbers puts you at risk for identity theft. This signifies that your money can be stolen, new accounts can be opened under your name, and your cards can be accessed. Scary as it is, organizations are also equally vulnerable to targeted attacks to gain personal information. According to What Is a Data Breach and How to Prevent It?, there are four common types of cyberattacks: phishing attacks, malware attacks, vulnerability exploits, and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Phishing attacks use social engineering to steal sensitive information, typically starting from an email or SMS messages, malware attacks happen when a malicious link or attachment is opened, allowing the attacker to insert their code onto the device and access the credentials and information. Vulnerability exploits, also known as a zero-day attack is when the hackers creates problems in a company website and launches it before it can be fixed and denial-of-service attacks are an overload of fake requests and messages to a company with hopes to crash and or damage the website.