Image via CrunchBase
In what seems to be a common trend in Cloud service businesses, Dropbox announced a security breach this week in which an user e-mail addresses and passwords were obtained from an employee account.
Earlier this month, Yahoo made a similar announcement with at least 400,000 users e-mail addresses and passwords breached with the resulting information posted online by a group of hackers trying to push yahoo to secure their numerous vulnerabilities.
Back on June 6th, LinkedIn confirmed that there was a major security breach on their website and that “some passwords” were stolen from user accounts. Those passwords were posted on a website in Russia with containing 6.5 Million encrypted passwords with additional reports of 200,000 of those passwords already been hacked.
In the next few days the media will probably pounce on this story and discuss various the various steps you should take in order to protect your identity online. What they will probably ignore is the fact that in the past year there have been over 800 security breaches and over 174 million compromised records.
And that’s only the security breaches that were discovered and reported on.
The truth is that most data breaches aren’t even discovered by the people who own the data, it’s usually a third party that makes the discovery. It just goes to show that if big companies like Linkedin, Yahoo or Dropbox can be compromised, any business can be at risk.
Jacadis' advice:
- Have a monitoring system in place that tracks and reports aberrant network traffic on your network or on any server that is exposed to the internet.
- Make sure your computers and network systems are up to date on their service and firmware patches.
- Make sure all your computers are up to date with their anti-virus program.
- Have a quarterly security audit performed on any internet applications your business might have to identify any possible security vulnerabilities.
- Perform a regular audit on your systems to make sure that your anti-virus and patching solutions are performing properly.
