A leaking faucet – Data Leaks\Breaches

Imagine you’re running a 400 million dollar company, you got the company’s car, insurance and maybe even dental care! Now imagine that all the information that is important to the company, will simply be published on an article, Facebook post, or even on a billboard outside of your favorite McDonald’s! These incidents are called Data Leaks.

Data Leaks, also known as Data Breaches, are security violations, in which, sensitive, protected or confidential data is copied, transmitted, viewed, stolen or used by an individual that is unauthorized to do so.

Data Leaks can involve information leakage, also known as exfiltration which means that unauthorized copying or transmission of data, is being executed, without affecting the source data.

This means that there are 2 types of people who might cause Data Leaks :

  • External factors, such as Attackers\Hackers, driven by personal motives.
  • Internally, such Employees, who did it by mistake (or not).

Data and Information has a certain value to the company, therefore, they are being treated as Intangible Assets.


Leaked information can range from matters compromising national security, to information on actions which a government or official considers embarrassing and wants to conceal, meaning that some people, are willing to pay big amounts of cash to someone obtaining that Data and threatening to reveal it.

Here’s a partial list of Data Leaks incidents that occur in the past few years :


(Provided by Wikipedia)

As you can see, often, these incidents occur in companies who possess “Big Names” in the industry, which indicates that the majority of these attacks are driven by a financial motive!

Money, Money and Money!

You can see that these cases are caused by the use of several different methods :

  • Hacked by and experienced attacker\s.
  • Lost or stolen computers that their hard drive holds valuable information, this is an example of tangible assets theft in order to obtain intangible assets.
  • Poor security, whether we talk about Cybersecurity or Security guards guarding the building where the Data is being saved physically.
  • Inside job, as mentioned before, it could be an employee making a mistake, or, on purpose.

Here are some steps you can take in order to minimize these incidents :

  1. Detection and classification of sensitive data in the organization.
  2. Proper risk assessment of existing data, deciding which data to leave and which to delete and allocating the necessary resources needed for protection accordingly.
  3. Tracking the uses of access and data.
  4. Identify the threats to your organization’s data.
  5. Protection and Response – the ability to stop any data-threatening activity.
  6. Implanting the “Zero Trust” Access Architecture (also known as SDP – Software Defined Perimeter), a “Micro Tunnel” will be created, allowing secure, encrypted and specific access of an authorized user to the application or server on which the data is stored, using this security tool ensures that once the connection between the user and the application is established, they are never exposed to anyone other than them, thus, in fact, dividing them from everyone else.

Our tool Cytrix can detect and help you in fixing any of the Vulnerabilities leading to these attacks that and by doing so, you are protecting Web Apps!

Remember! your most valuable asset, is probably your browser history!

Stay safe, choose Cytrix.

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