Potential threats that can lead to data breaches

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Indusface, has worked out the potential threats that can lead to data breaches, along with ways to deal with these loopholes.

Ashish Tandon, Chairman and CEO, Indusface said, "Where big organisations have the resources to handle a data breach, the small and medium enterprises don't. With big data and cloud being deemed as the way into the future, there is a need to identify the risk factors and deal with them without losing time."

Here are some potential threats that can lead to data breaches, along with ways to deal with these loopholes:

Top Web App Vulnerabilities

According to a Gartner report, 75 percent of the hacking attempts take place at the application layer. The Open Web Application Security Project, popularly known as the OWASP, has listed top 10 application vulnerabilities that can be exploited by attackers.

The detected application vulnerabilities can then be mitigated through a managed web application firewall. It shields the application without any changes to the code and makes sure that attackers cannot exploit the vulnerabilities.

Unrestricted Access to Employees

Most organisations face an internal abuse of the database and server privileges. The lack of implementing controlled access to trusted employees often leads to a loss of sensitive information. Privilege control mechanism control according to job profiles need to be monitored periodically.

Malware

Malware is another example of the widely used attack mechanism used by the hackers that install these executable code scripts that remain untraced for long periods and send data to the owner in batches without any notification to the system administrator.

Regular malware hunting is critical for enterprise and government websites to prevent the transmission of sensitive data. System and web application scanning can help detect malware through the OSI layers.

Weak Database Management

Databases record huge chunks of information and it's often impossible to keep track of what's where on the server. As a matter of fact, most organizations do not really pay a lot of attention in the direction and that's exactly where they fail. Many times during the testing phase of applications too, unknown new databases are created randomly that the security team might not be able to locate.

Weak or No Encryption

Whether it is backup database or data communication over the internet, encryption with unique keys is the best way to ensure that it's not sniffed around. However, till today, most companies have not switched to best encryption practices and with vulnerabilities like POODLE and FREAK, it gets easier to hack. And for unencrypted data, it's a nightmare.