How To Prevent Enterprise Data Breaches (2024)

It’s all too common: Hackers target enterprises and cause data breaches that expose valuable data like payment information, software vulnerabilities, and business secrets. 

Data breaches are increasing in frequency and can have a massive impact on your enterprise. With this in mind, keep reading to discover the state of data breaches in 2023 and how you can react in 2024.

This guide will teach you how to prevent data breaches by understanding the main threats and the corresponding security best practices. 

In full, this data breach prevention guide includes:     

A data breach (or data leak) is a cybersecurity incident involving unauthorized access to sensitive data. The compromised data is often confidential information, personal details, intellectual property, or financial information like credit card numbers.

During or after the data breach, sensitive data may be viewed, changed, stolen, or transferred for illegal purposes.  

A data breach usually refers to a digital attack, but physical resources, such as computer hard drives and paper records, can be subject to data breaches.  

Famous data breaches have shaken the public’s trust in large enterprises. Consider three recent examples.

With three billion accounts impacted, Yahoo experienced one of the most significant data breaches in history. Hackers capitalized on security flaws to steal customers’ personal information, including names, phone numbers, and passwords.  

While the initial breaches occurred in 2013 and 2014, they weren’t publicly announced until 2016. Moreover, the true extent of the data breaches only came to light a year later.   

Following the breach, Yahoo’s sale price to Verizon was reduced by $350 million, and the company had to pay hefty damages to some affected users. 

The company behind Facebook is no stranger to information security incidents. In fact, 553 million accounts had personal data leaked in 2021, which resulted in a €265 million fine imposed by Ireland’s Data Protection Commission.

In 2023, the same commission fined Meta $1.3 billion for improper data transfers between the European Union and the U.S.  

In May 2023, threat actors used fake authentication tokens to gain access to the emails of 25 organizations stored in the public cloud, including U.S. government agencies. They accessed 38 TB of private data in total during this security incident.

The examples above and similar public cloud attacks have encouraged large enterprises to switch to private cloud hosting with reputable web hosts like Liquid Web.  

Cyberattacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, but threat actors still use common approaches. Here are a few to be aware of to prevent enterprise data breaches.

The term “malware” is a portmanteau of “malicious” and “software.” Hackers aim to infect a computer with a software program with a hostile goal. One example is software that records the victim’s keystrokes — usually so their passwords can be isolated.

Ransomware is a notable type of malware that aims to render data or software inaccessible until the victim sends the hacker money. Ransomware attacks often target governments and large enterprises because of their ability to pay large sums and the persuasive threat of disrupting a service affecting millions of people.    

Cybercriminals can mimic legitimate communication from trusted sources like banks, delivery services, and insurance companies. This social engineering attack tricks people into providing sensitive information or exposing their devices to malware.

Emails are a common medium for phishing attacks, but phone calls and text messages are also used. Real-world events can also lead to phishing. For example, identity theft can happen when personally identifiable information (PII) is obtained from a brief look at someone’s ID card.   

Enterprise staff should be alert to phishing attacks via email and social media platforms like LinkedIn. 

Hackers sometimes guess passwords using software that attempts every possible combination. In a brute force attack, millions of login credential possibilities are entered until the process of elimination reveals the right answer. 

According to the chief operating officer of Talion, a managed IT security service, the rise in data breaches can be attributed to poor investment in security and the increasingly advanced approaches used by cybercriminals.

With this in mind, large organizations must increase their time and investment in threat detection to prevent the consequences of data loss.  

The effects of a cyberattack are often wide-ranging and multifaceted. A single enterprise data breach can cause financial losses, reputational damage, and legal consequences.

According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023, each data breach costs the affected company an average of $4.45 million. This average has increased by 15% in the past three years. 

Downtime after a security breach drains enterprise finances. Unity Communications estimates that downtime costs $5,600 to $9,000 per minute, depending on the size of the enterprise. 

This is due to lost revenue, responses to security issues, and patching up exposed weaknesses. As the adage goes, prevention is better than a cure, and this certainly holds true for enterprise data breaches.  

Data breaches can decimate consumer trust in your business, especially if you handle sensitive personal data, such as social security numbers.   

Staff at some large enterprises have attempted to hide security issues to prevent reputational damage, but full transparency and swift action are needed when customer trust is at stake. 

If you fail to protect customer data or notify them about a breach, you could be fined by a government agency. 

• U.S. state laws: All 50 American states have data breach notification laws. Moreover, 19 states changed or considered changing these notification laws in 2022. It takes diligence to stay up to date with data privacy.
• EU laws: If you operate in the European Union, you must follow the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Consequently, if your company fails to comply, it could be fined up to €20 million or 4% of its yearly global revenue—whichever is higher.
• Healthcare-specific laws: If your company handles protected healthcare information in the U.S., you must adhere to the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA). Liquid Web offers HIPAA-compliant hosting to help you avoid hefty fines.