5 data breach warning signs that most businesses miss

Every business needs to practice best efforts to defend against data breaches right now. After all, your data holds a hefty amount of your business’ value – both financially and intellectually. If it gets into the wrong hands, it can distress your business, and if they’re affected, your customers too.

That means protecting your data in transit and at rest, both on-premises and in the cloud, is essential. You can’t afford any loose ends.

Data breach statistics: the writing is on the wall

• 277 days is the average length of time it takes security teams to identify and contain a data breach. And that doesn’t include your recovery time.
• 39% of UK businesses reported a breach in in 2022. Of course, that doesn’t include those that chose not to report one, or that didn’t know one was happening…
• A study from IBM revealed that 45% of data breaches were cloud based.
• The average cost of a data breach for UK companies last year was recorded to be USD 5.05 million. We’re the fourth highest ranking country in the world for costliest breaches.
• And even if your business is downstream of an attack, it could still feel the effects: it’s predicted that by 2025, 45% of businesses globally will be impacted by a supply chain attack.

The threats are very real, and regardless of your business size, it’s critical that you catch data breaches early, before the impact becomes too devastating.

There are a few tell-tale signs that malicious activity could be occurring within your network, but they can be tricky to spot. Businesses simply don’t have the time to constantly monitor for these activities and can’t rely on employees to be as vigilant as they’d ideally like.

The 5 data breach warning signs that most businesses miss:

1. Performance degradation – this one can be extra tricky to gauge. From a client device perspective, you’re relying on your users to spot degradation and alert you to it. When it comes to your other hardware and software, if you’re not already monitoring performance, it can slip away over time and be too late before it gets noticed.
2. Anomalous data usage – if you suddenly experience an unexpected spike in data movement – perhaps from a particular source, application or user, it could be a sign that a breach is occurring. You need to be able to track events like this, and establish a root cause as soon as you can.
3. Data leaks – Perhaps one of the most common, but still often missed signs: something gets out that shouldn’t have. The source of the leak needs to be quickly established – is it accidental? Or is it something darker?
4. Unexpected password changes – We’re all guilty of forgetting our passwords from time to time. With users regularly forgetting or mistyping their passwords, it’s easy for them to respond to unexpected password reset prompts, without verifying their source first. But for IT teams, these unexpected password changes can only really be spotted if there is clear communication between them and their users as to when and why passwords change, so users can better identify anomalous prompts. If not, this can be an easy entry route for malicious actors, and a sure-fire warning sign that your data is at risk.
5. Locked user accounts – Similarly to unexpected password changes, users can find themselves locked out of their accounts. When reissuing access, IT teams must be careful to make sure they aren’t inadvertently unlocking the door to their data.

So, what happens if you do miss them?

Simply put, your business could easily become one of the statistics above.

The warning signs, big or small, aren’t easy to spot if you don’t have the right solutions on hand. Preventing security incidents like these from becoming a full-on breach means acting fast. But you can’t act fast if you aren’t armed with the right information.

How can you prevent them?

We believe that protecting your data from being lost, stolen or corrupted means minding your 3 R’s:

• Managing your risk: Without insight into how your data protection strategy is performing, how can you understand your weak points, and therefore how to truly protect your data from a breach?
  • The solution: Feel confident that your data is always safe with back-up solutions and an immutable layer of data storage, or airgap, where once something is written, it cannot be changed or deleted. This airgap layer can be deployed on top of your existing environment or even your chosen cloud to instantly reduce your susceptibility to risk of data loss.
• Protecting against ransomware: Ransomware attacks are one of the biggest threats facing businesses right now. You can’t afford to not have comprehensive ransomware protection.
  • The solution: Protecting against ransomware means having a solution that not only detects threats, but neutralises them, before they’ve had chance to cause any damage.
• Guaranteeing rapid recovery: You can’t always rely on your back-up to restore your day-to-day activities. Malicious actors see back-ups as an unguarded door – protected to an extent but once opened, an opportunity that’s every bit as attractive as your live environment.
  • The solution: Prevent encryption and corruption of your back-up by deploying immutable storage. If you use a combination of impenetrable back-up security, such as Arcserve’s OneXafe, and combine it with minute-by-minute snapshots, you can restore your environment almost immediately after an incident, and do so fully confident that the data you’re restoring is clean and unaffected.

Rapid rescue

At the moment, everyone needs everything ‘yesterday’. And while you can’t go back in time to prevent a security incident, you can rapidly deploy solutions which will slot into your environment and be effective against new ones within days.

Data protection solutions like Arcserve are quick to implement and get running. For example, Arcserve’s immutable storage can be overlaid on existing solutions to give you comprehensive data protection in days. It’s a quick, straightforward solution to start mitigating risk.

Prevention is the best cure

Having a tool that goes further than just spotting the warning signs, and that actually defends your data, is the missing link in your data protection strategy. Arcserve does just that: it defends against ransomware, protects your cloud and on-prem workloads, all whilst reducing IT complexity. And in the event of an incident, your recovery time is massively reduced.

If you want to understand more about how Servium and Arcserve can keep your business and its data safe, book a free Proof of Value or talk to us.