Ddos 
IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach 2024 report revealed that the highest data breach costs were generated by malicious attackers, with the average cost reaching $4.88 million. While this category focuses on intentional attacks, it excludes unintentional actions that also compromise an organization’s data and cause harm to its security posture. Malicious attacks are often caused by the misuse of privileges granted to an employee while unintentional attacks are triggered by the human error. From a lack of security awareness to a negligence in adhering to security practices, the human element covers a range of errors.
The Verizon 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report states that “the human element was a component in 68% of breaches,” excluding any malicious actions by insiders. The report clarifies the intention behind separating privilege misuse from honest human mistakes is to emphasize that the latter could be prevented through security awareness training. However, there are security measures that must be taken much before conducting employee training sessions, especially when employees are not aware of what is to be done with data that is no longer useful.
Data Management: Highly Significant Yet Sidelined
Every business that processes personal data irrespective of its size, is responsible for safeguarding that collected data. From promoting products and services to providing after-sales service, collection, storage, maintenance, and sharing of data is necessary to ensure business operates seamlessly.
But what happens to the data of customers who no longer require your service?
What happens to the data after the legal retention period is over?
What happens to the data when the devices are upgraded or replaced?
And what of all the collected data that is no longer needed?
Too often this data is left unattended, unmanaged, and hoarded unnecessarily. It is assumed that unused or outdated data poses no security risk. Rather, this forgotten data contains sensitive information such as Personally Identifiable Information (PII), Protected Health Information (PHI), and financial records.
The compromise of this data, especially by insiders, can lead to data breaches and severe consequences like violation of data protection laws, hefty penalties, and legal suits, damage to reputation and trust, and operational downtime.
The longer it takes to identify the data breach, the higher the cost of the damage caused. In the case of insider threats, detecting an incident is even tougher. To avoid all these repercussions and getting burdened by the heap of damages, there is only one solution – Data Erasure.
Data Erasure Prevents Insider Threats and Protects Your Business
Data erasure is an added shield, a precaution that enables proactive cybersecurity in an organization. Secure data erasure eradicates data that is no longer needed permanently and irreversibly. It reduces data footprint, prevents internal misuse, helps attain compliance, builds trust of customers and stakeholders, and strengthens your cybersecurity posture.
However, there is a process to this proactive strategy, which is initiated by policies and led by practices. Read the below suggestions to understand how data erasure can prevent insider threats:
- Create Data Retention Policy: Organizations must form a data retention policy that states the retention period legally for different types of data, namely, confidential, internal, public, and related to national security. The sensitivity of data directly relates to the impact it can create upon getting leaked. The higher the sensitivity, the more vulnerable it is, and the stricter the security controls should be. In short, a data retention policy decides for how long the data is to be retained and when it should be erased. Data retention policy prevents unnecessary data hoarding, reduces risks, and storage costs.
- Implement Access Control Policy: An access control policy must be defined specifying who can access data and under what conditions. An insider might misuse their privilege to access, modify, and share this data with an unauthorized party. The user access rights must be granted only after authentication is successful. Further, ensuring that no unused, unnecessary, and excessive data is retained is a preventive measure that organizations can take to ensure their data is protected.
- Define Data Destruction Policy: Defining a data destruction policy is essential to direct how the data should be erased after the retention period is over or data is no longer needed. This policy includes the details of storage technology that is used to store company data, approved data destruction methods based on storage technology, maintaining records of destruction, verifying process, responsibilities of the Data Protection Officer (DPO), etc. While traditional methods like degaussing, shredding, disintegrating, etc., help destroy the media and data, they are harmful for the environment and must not be followed. Alternative methods like data erasure must be followed for promoting sustainability and device reuse. The policy must also define the data erasure software to be used by the organization for erasing drives and devices. BitRaser is one such professional software that is tested and certified by multiple bodies and helps erase data permanently beyond recovery.Even while selecting a software-based data erasure technique, a decision must be made based on the storage media used by the company and preference must be given to that software that erases hidden disk areas and/or user-inaccessible zones.
- Prioritize On-prem Data Erasure: The recent data breach case where an IT Asset Disposition company’s employee along with his accomplice stole and resold retired IT assets including laptops, smartphones, and servers mostly from government agencies is a prime example of how an insider can endanger data privacy easily. Businesses that have no means to prevent such neglect in maintaining a secure chain of custody must erase data onsite before sending the devices to a facility for further disposal.
- Create End-of-Life Device Policy: Organizations should create EOL policy that ensures all data on devices like laptops, desktops, mobile phones, servers, etc., is securely erased before disposal, resale, or reuse. Further, the policy should also define the procedures to be followed at the time of user off-boarding.
- Define Cloud Data Erasure Policy: The policy should contain how redundant data from cloud services, virtual machines, or SaaS-based platforms must be erased. The timeline and responsibility for data erasure must be defined in the policy.
Lessons Learnt
The transition from reactive to proactive cybersecurity has become mainstream and is implemented in all organizations today. However, the preventive security measure that must be paid heed to when defining cybersecurity policies is DATA ERASURE. Businesses all over the world have to comply with data protection laws and regulations like EU-GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, TDPSA, etc., which require them to destroy data once it has served its purpose. This infers that if a company chooses to be negligent about the security threat an insider can pose, the authorities will remind them by holding them responsible and imposing the due penalties.
The onus is on the businesses to secure their data from dangerous outsiders and insiders.