Data Breaches: A Story of Money, Greed, and Negligence
If you’re familiar with the seven deadly sins, you know that greed is one of them. Benign greed like ambition or wealth isn’t inherently bad, but when it comes at the cost of the expense or harm of others, even hospitals and schools aren’t off the table. With money motivating 86% of breaches , financial payoff over reasons like espionage has become a prominent factor for cybercriminals worldwide. Cybercriminals looking to make a buck (or a million) have a few different options. They can exploit you by stealing your data or blocking access to critical assets, holding it ransom for $11 million and succeeding. Others sell 91 million user records for $5000 , repeating the deed after seeing initial success, affecting millions of additional users every time. Besides the ethics behind the crime, the financial cost to enterprises is substantial. The average cost of a data breach reached a record high of $4.35 million in 2022 . O...