How To Prevent Data Breaches: Best Practices

Haar Cloud
best practices, cyber security, data breach
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October is the cyber security awareness month, so we want to talk more about protecting your business from data breaches. Why this exact type of cyber attack?

Well, on a global scale, the average cost of a data breach was $4.45 million in 2023, and that’s a 15% increase over 3 years, according to a report by IBM.

So, you see, data breaches can cost your business a lot, from huge financial losses to damages to your brand’s reputation and disrupting your team’s day-to-day routine.

And this type of cyber attack happens more frequently, growing more advanced each day. That’s why we believe your business has to secure its critical data by implementing strong preventative measures.

To help you better understand the ins and outs of this cyber threat, we decided to write the next article to explain what qualifies as a data breach, the main causes behind it, and the different ways of protecting your data.

Now, what are these data breach attacks, and what are the most common causes behind them? Let’s find out.

Understanding breaches and what causes them

Let’s start by pointing out the good news: there are ways you can prevent this from happening. So keep that in mind as you read on.

So, what is a data breach? Also called a data leak, this is a type of cyber security attack where confidential and sensitive data is accessed or extracted by unauthorized individuals.

Contrary to what some of you may think, nobody is immune to data breaches, no matter how small or new your business is.

Now, what qualifies for a data breach? Well, here are some examples:

– Hackers manage to bypass network defenses to steal your customer-sensitive data

– An employee emails confidential data to unauthorized third parties

– Malware or ransomware attack that manages to extract or encrypt data

– Cloud database is misconfigured for public access

– Devices with unencrypted data get lost or stolen.

Of course, there are many reasons why breaches happen, but typically they are caused by:

– Phishing scams that trick users into revealing credentials

– Unpatched software or operating system vulnerabilities

– Weak passwords lead to compromised employee accounts with access to confidential or sensitive data

– Malware infections that bypass endpoint defenses.

In the last couple of years, there have been quite a few famous data breaches, with the attack on Yahoo being the largest data breach in history. Hackers exploited a weakness in the company’s cookie system which gave them access to the confidential data of all 3 billion of Yahoo’s users. If you want to know more about some of the biggest data breaches in recent years, here’s a great article.

Now that you know a bit about data breaches and why they occur, let’s see some of the best practices you need to adopt to prevent such an attack from happening.

Develop strong access controls

The first step in preventing data breaches, in our opinion, is to limit access to sensitive data and systems. Your business should only grant each of the people in your team the minimum access needed for their roles and responsibilities.

In other words, only the right people should have access to your most important data. For that to happen, you need to implement access control measures, such as such as multi-factor authentication, user activity monitoring, and data encryption.

Also, your IT team has to continuously monitor and audit access to quickly detect any unusual or unauthorized activity. The fewer entry points there are into critical assets, the better.

Add endpoint security controls

The days when we only work from the office are long gone. These days, remote and hybrid work is the new normal, and endpoint protection is now more important than ever.

So, make sure all your endpoints have updated antimalware, patched operating systems, encrypted drives, and tools like firewalls and VPNs. Your team should also monitor them closely for anomalies, which is a task that applies to all of these best practices.

All these measures provide important layers of threat detection, helping your business stay protected against phishing attempts, drive-by downloads, and other infection vectors.

Keep on patching

Patching and updating IT systems regularly should be a top priority for IT teams. Surprisingly this is often overlooked. According to this Action1 survey, 62% of businesses experienced security incidents that involved a known vulnerability for which a patch was already available but not yet deployed.

So, make sure your team has a plan in place for promptly testing and deploying relevant patches across all equipment, servers, operating systems, and software. Our recommendation is to prioritize patching by severity rather than relying on preset schedules.

Secure your network

Your network perimeter is actually your first line of defense against external threats. There are quite a few technologies and tools you need to use to enable controlled access and enhanced threat visibility.

Here are some of the must-have security tools your business should have in place:

– Firewalls can filter your inbound and outbound traffic based on protocol, port, IP address, and content.

– Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS): these can monitor traffic for known attack patterns and actively block detected threats trying to penetrate defenses.

– Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS) can passively scan traffic and system logs to detect potential attacks and anomalous behaviors.

– Access Control Lists (ACLs) have features that allow/deny access by specifying trusted IP addresses, ports, and protocols.

– Web Application Firewalls provide deep inspection of web traffic looking for injections, cross-site scripting, and other application layer attacks.

Backup your data regularly

Yes, backups do not actually prevent data breaches or any type of cyber attacks in fact. But they will help you recover fast if a breach happens. They also limit the potential damage ransomware and similar attacks can do if they infiltrate your systems.

That’s why is also high on our list of best practices, as we believe strong backup plans and continuity processes should be a must for any business.

So, start by scheduling regular backups of your critical systems, servers, endpoints, and data stores. Then, make sure you have backup copies both onsite and offsite/cloud for redundancy. Test your backup systems frequently to ensure they are reliable. The testing step can also help you set up a clear process for data recovery.

Encrypt data at rest and in transit

Encryption is a powerful tool for keeping your sensitive data protected at rest or in transit between systems. Encryption converts plaintext data into ciphertext using encryption algorithms and keys.

At rest, so when your data is inactive, it should be encrypted by default on servers, databases, laptops, mobile devices, backups or any endpoint. This protects lost or stolen assets and stops unauthorized access even with physical access to storage.

Common encryption methods used for data at rest include full disk encryption, file/folder encryption, and encrypted virtual disks.

Data should also be encrypted whenever transmitted across networks, systems and services. That means the traffic between offices, to/from the cloud, over wireless networks, via email, or any internet transmission.

Standard protocols like SSL/TLS, SSH, and VPNs facilitate encrypting data in motion. All of these prevention measures can prevent eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle types of attacks.

Install monitoring tools

Your business must have full visibility into your network activity to be able to prevent breaches, right? This means you should install and use tools like intrusion detection systems, security information and event management (SIEM), and analytics to track anomalies and suspicious behaviors across all your systems and your network.

All these tools can provide broad monitoring that can reveal suspicious activities for your IT security teams to investigate.

With the invention of AI tools, you have also the option to use AI-powered network monitoring and detection tools to track sophisticated threats that bypass traditional security tools. These can be network detection and response platforms (NDR) and security orchestration, automation, and response tools (SOAR).

Secure your cloud environments

If your infrastructure and software are mainly on the cloud, or you want to make the move to the cloud soon, then you must also take steps to secure all these environments against data breaches.

Start by doing your research on the cloud provider of your choice and learn what is their security architecture, certifications, and capabilities before actually making the move.

Then enable data encryption by default, and also restrict access through identity management and implementing least privilege permissions. You should also use activity logging and anomaly detection to monitor for threats, and make sure you can backup or migrate data out of the cloud if needed.

Promote a security-first culture

As you may know, the human element is the main reason breaches happen in 2023.

At least that’s what the last Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report showed, they actually uncovered that 74% of breaches occurred due to social engineering attacks, errors, or misuse.

As you can see, the technical side of your cyber security can only get you so far. However, the way your team behaves and knows these best practices has a huge impact.

All these means you need to provide extensive cyber security training that guides them on strong password best practices and multi-factor authentication, social engineering or phishing detection, safe public Wi-Fi usage, and handling sensitive data.

If you make sure your team knows the latest security best practices, they can identify and report threats to your cyber security team. And ultimately they will become your strongest defense.

Key takeaways

So, let’s sum up, the most important steps to take to prevent data breaches are:

Develop strong limited access and controls
Strengthen endpoints, devices, email, and cloud environments
Patch and update while monitoring systems closely for endpoint protection
Encrypt data at rest and in transit
Backup regularly in case of cyber attacks like ransomware
Provide extensive cyber security awareness training for your team

Of course, no business can be 100% breach-proof, but with these prevention measures in place, you and your team can stay on top of new risks and large-scale attacks.

Need help developing a strong cyber security defense against data breaches? Book a free call and let’s chat.

Tags: best practices cyber security data breach