“Information” -It is the channel for competitive advantage for organisations in market, source of awareness among common masses, a shock or a surprise, and there are lot more adjectives that can be used to describe this word. These information can be sensitive or public which when not taken proper care could lead to extreme consequences , adversely affecting one’s life and even an organisation’s reputation. Information is like the oxygen in this modern era without which everything on earth seems lifeless. The increasing use of social-media like instagram, facebook, wassup etc. among people has managed to gather a lot of personal data in the cloud which when caught in the hands of unauthorized person can be a medium of revenge, ransom & can pose several other threats to individual lives.
From organisational point of view, loss of data & software are very crucial to their business even though equipment theft poses a real problem.Increasing use of internet has exposed organisations to virus attack, illegal network access, DOS attack & the percentage of organisation reporting hacking incidents has trebled with telephone systems as a new target.Not all breaches are the result of crime, inadvertent misuse and human error play their part too. Among these, more common & destructive ones are like fire, system crashes and power cut. Data breaches due to human error could be as simple as emailing an internal document to a client by accident.Such security breaches of 2016 includes ‘Snapchat’s 700 current & former employees personal information been stolen when used a phishing scam t0 trick an employee into emailing them the private data like SSN, wage/payroll, name etc.
As the old saying goes “Prevention is better than cure”, we should play safe to remain untouched by mega security breaches posing heavy loses.
