When people hear about a data leak, their first thought is passwords or credit card numbers. But the danger of exposure depends on what information is about, what it can be combined with, and what someone can do with it.
One piece of information might not seem particularly dangerous on its own. But when several details are revealed in combination, they can paint a much clearer picture of an individual, provide access to an account or expose sensitive business information.
Understanding these differences will help companies know where to direct their efforts.
Why Some Information Is More Dangerous Than Other Information
The sensitivity of information is not only determined by the format. Potential impact is also important.
For example, an employee’s work email address is typically less sensitive than their password. An email address does not usually get you right into an account, but a password does.
Information is especially dangerous when it can be used to:
- Sign in to an account or system
- Steal someone’s identity
- Engage in financial crimes
- Impersonate a person
- Give away private personal information
- Reveal sensitive business information
- Combine with other information to create increased security or privacy risk
That’s why businesses need to look beyond individual files and consider the context and sensitivity of the information they hold.
Passwords and Credentials Can Give Direct Access
Passwords, authentication tokens, API keys and other credentials can be some of the most immediately dangerous information to leak.
The simple reason is that these details can be a key to an existing account or system .
For example, an employee password exposed in a data breach could give access to email, cloud applications, internal documents, or other services. The risk is even higher if the same password is used in several accounts.
And that’s why credentials have to be treated differently than regular contact information.
Financial Information Can Enable Fraud
Disclosing bank account numbers, payment card details, financial statements, transaction histories and other financial information can be very risky.
Depending on what is revealed, criminals could use financial information for fraud, unauthorised transactions, targeted scams or social engineering.
Financial information may also be made more valuable when combined with personal details such as a person’s name, address or identification information.
Identity Information Can Enable Impersonation
Apart from names and phone numbers, more extensive identity records are much more sensitive.
In addition, government ID numbers, passport details, driver’s license details, date of birth, or copies of identity documents can give a person enough information to engage in impersonation or identity theft activities.
One main thing is that personal information does not have the same degree of privacy. A company needs to identify and separate ordinary contact details from the sensitive details that can be used in a reliable way to confirm a person’s identity.
Health Information Can Reveal Private Details
In medical records, diagnostics, medication, therapy records, medical insurance data, and other health-related information, highly private information about a person can be revealed.
It won’t only affect a person economically. Information may also raise privacy issues, lead to discrimination, emotional upset, or regulatory actions against the organization in control of the information.
Healthcare facilities are not the only places where such data is handled. Employers, insurance companies, benefits providers, and other businesses may also handle medical records.
Confidential Business Information Can Be Just as Valuable
Sensitive Information isn’t just restricted to that of individuals.
In addition to personal information, businesses may possess other sensitive information like confidential business contracts, pricing strategies, sales figures, financial forecasting, intellectual property rights, product roadmaps, development or source code documents, customers’ lists, and strategic internal documents.
If such secrets are divulged, they may lead to competitive advantage gains by rivals, be used against negotiation parties, harm the relationships with customer base, or cause financial and public-image loss.
For some organizations, the loss of a single confidential business document would be much more harmful than the loss of thousands of regular documents.
Why Combining Information Makes Exposure More Dangerous
One of the major concepts about data exposure is that certain sets of information can have different privacy implications.
Lets illustrate the concept with a simple and easily understood example:
On its own, an email address may only be mildly harmful. If, however, the attacker has also obtained the person’s full name, home phone number, day of birth, and login info, those items can be combined for a much more plausible impersonation or targeted email attack.
Exactly for that reason, companies should not just analyze data on a document or document set level. They should also be aware of what various sets of data might disclose if presented as such to an adversary.
How Data Classification Helps Identify Sensitive Information
Mixing the data sources, as the business records spread to various places like databases, cloud storage, spreadsheets, applications, and shared folders, the companies can’t be sure of which data should be considered as priority.
Using a data classification system is a method to group data by the type and the level of sensitivity of the data. In the example, a classification could be that customer contact data is low sensitivity, and financial records and identity documents are at medium sensitivity, with confidential business documents at high or very high sensitivity.
This will help the team to know better what kind of information they have and which ones should be treated more strictly.
Why Sensitive Data Discovery Matters
Classification can really bring value when an organization clearly knows its sensitive information locations.
Sensitive data discovery assists companies with finding where the private and confidential information is spread across different systems. The process can unearth information, which might have been missed, such as sensitive data stored in aging databases, shared drives, cloud platforms, or business apps.
Being aware of such risks enables businesses to channel a lot of their energy on the information that poses a greater risk rather than assuming that each piece has the same level of exposure.
What Should Businesses Do With This Information?
There is no common list of details that can bring equal dangers to different organizations. The extent of risk is determined by the nature of data, whose data it is, where it is located, and if it leaks, what damage could result.
The first, and probably the most effective, thing you can do is:
- Learn and recognize what is considered confidential information by your business.
- Detects where that data is in different systems.
- Group data based on its level of risk.
- Check out who is authorized to access the database and whether that access is justified.
- Keep those pieces of information which are still relevant and discard or destroy those ones which are not needed anymore.
- Keep up-to-date and review sensitive data at regular intervals as the enterprise progresses.
Having said all that, minimizing data collection is just one part. The whole point is to figure out how much damage any disclosure of a given dataset could potentially do and then, be able to, if it so happens that the dataset gets out, at the very beginning of any breach, minimize the impact of such disclosure.
By locating the spots where confidential information is kept and knowing its degree of privacy at those spots, companies can enhance their visibility levels, privacy and compliance management functions significantly.
How Businesses Can Reduce the Risk
Guarding your confidential data starts with realizing what you own.
Companies need to keep track of how and where sensitive data is identified, who can get to it, and whether it is still necessary for retaining such data as time goes on.
By means of finding and defining the kind of sensitive data that the company is handling, they shall get a more explicit picture of their information landscape. When businesses know what sensitive information is available they are better placed to set up security access and retention policies, monitoring, and compliance.
This is not the matter of collecting only less data. Rather it’s a process which leads to knowing the data that the company already has and providing sensitive information with the most appropriate level of care and attention.
Top comments (0)