Data is the lifeline of an organization. It is the most precious and valuable asset of any organization with a digital presence. Statistics suggest that data breaches take place every second. Yes. That’s true. Most data breaches are kept under the radar. Most people believe that high-end technology and a big budget is necessary for data protection. While they do certainly help, oftentimes it comes down to the most basic security measures to keep data safe. In this article, we take a look at significant data breaches on the internet and how such incidents can be prevented from occurring in the future.

1)Panera Bread leak in April 2018– Brian Krebs, a leading IT journalist revealed in April 2018 that at least 37 million customer records of the Panera Bread had been affected. The U.S. bakery chain was reportedly leaking customer records unknowingly through plain text on it’s poorly maintained website continuously for eight months. This breach, however, was reported by Dylan Houlihan, a security researcher who tipped the IT journalist after officials at the Panera Bakery refused to respond to Houlihan in spite of him letting them know about the bug in 2017. During the breach, millions of records of the bakery’s customers were compromised and were accessible through the website, database management, One of the key lessons from this breach is masking it Surplus Service, we use multiple ways to ensure that secure information is handled with care. The main tools our Data Destruction Services use are data wiping, degaussing and destruction.

2)U.S. voter record leak in June 2017 – The biggest data breaches of all time was the U.S. voter leak in June 2017 were at least 198 million U.S. voter records via an exposed Amazon Simple Storage Servers (S3) that belonged to Republican data analytics firm Deep Root Analytics resulted in breaching millions of voters’ personal information including sensitive data such as names and phone numbers, voter profiles that relied on data gathered over ten years. This case till date is the largest exposure of voter-related data. Experts say that IT managers must be highly alert and pay attention to system settings. The illusion that using a service as AWS can have everything secured is not always true. IT managers need to ensure that encryption is important to secure especially when dealing with sensitive customer data.

3)Uber Data Breach– The cab service giant was reportedly fined a whopping USD$148 million for failing to notify their drivers that they had been hacked back in 2016. Uber took over a year to break the news that over 600,000 drivers’ personal data were stolen. Apparently, Uber quietly paid USD $100,000 in ransom to ensure the breach was covered up.