The month of January has already given way to several large big data breaches, and it looks as though that trend is here to stay for the rest of 2014.
The credit card data breaches in South Korea and the US’s Target Corp breach have been high profile, in addition to the hacking of 16 million German email accounts and data breaches at Nieman Marcus Inc and Easton-Bell sports Inc means it has been hard to avoid news of big companies being compromised.
"These security breaches were all different but had a common cause: negligence," said Leonid Bershidsky in a Bloomberg report.
"Although the technology and techniques to protect data, or at least to make life more difficult for hackers, have been around for years, companies and their customers mostly assumed that data theft was something that happened to other people. They need to start getting wise,"he advised.
Bershidsky raises a good point: data theft is not the distant threat it used to be, it is very much here now.
Companies need to stop living in denial and take more significant steps to protect their data by using more secure passwords, use the correct security software and be vigilant when it comes to checking logs to ensure that any anomalies are detected ASAP.
