4 responses 01/28
Mukhesh Work:
The risk and cost of a compromised data integrity breach directly affect the business in terms of trustworthiness, economics, compensation that needs to be paid. And most of all, how to recover and how long it takes to recover the data. A privacy breach magnifies to a data breach when it surpasses the thresholds set by federal/state legislation. Under such legislation, entities must notify overseeing bodies, affected customers, and other necessary individuals. (A privacy breach magnifies to a data breach when it surpasses the thresholds set by federal/state legislation. Under such legislation, entities must notify overseeing bodies, affected customers, and other necessary individuals). It’s scary, but data integrity attacks have the power to bring down an entire company and beyond; entire stock markets could be poisoned and collapsed by faulty data; the power grid and other IoT systems from traffic lights to the water supply could be severely disrupted if the data they run on were to be altered (Gurus, 2016). Data breaches can be of many types like physical attacks, ransomware, insider threats, phishing, SQL-Injection.
For today’s discussion, we mainly focus on the risk and cost associated with data integrity attacks. Data integrity attacks are, of course, nothing new, yet they remain under the radar of businesses who have an ever-increasing reliance on data and make huge business decisions based on its analysis (Gurus, 2016). When data Integrity is failed to maintain it will affect the authorization of the systems, accuracy of the transactions, and data entered. Incorrect in the data entered, processed, and given for intelligence decisions. The audit controls associated with data that is processed would be inadequate that could impact transactions.
Data Integrity risks assessment would be carried by standalone assessment tools and the practices developed in data-acquisition and processing. Every data team level maintains data integrity. When the data is loaded into the system, it is the responsibility of the data quality engineer/data architect to check if the data within the systems is maintained is proper or not, and there should be frequent data audits performed by companies security teams to see how data flow is being carried out right from the moment it started to flow into the system. Data breaches caused can be calculated based on how much each record costs multiplied by how many records got affected. The immediate task after the event of a breach caused by data integrity is to taken action on how much data is affected, how who are consumers, and how to rectify the breach. The expectation of external regulatory agencies is that all regulated data be maintained in a state which is attributable, legible, contemporaneously recorded, original (or a true copy), and accurate (ALCOA) (Data Integrity Assessment 2019).
Let’s consider the example of the Equifax data breach. In March 2017, personally identifying data of hundreds of millions of people was stolen from Equifax, one of the credit reporting agencies that assess the financial health of nearly everyone in the United States (Fruhlinger, 2020). The hack exposed over 147 million American citizens, including their SSN, names, and other personal information. The claims ranged from $125-$20000. During the investigation in Equifax, they highlighted a number of security lapses that allowed attackers to enter secured systems that exploited terabytes of data. The total number of days the breach happened is for 76 days with 147 million records, and Equifax invested $1.4 billion to upgrade their security systems.
References:
Data Integrity Assessment. (2019, March 21). Retrieved January 29, 2021, from https://astrixinc.com/professional-services/data-integrity-assessment/
Fruhlinger, J. (2020, February 12). Equifax data breach FAQ: What happened, who was affected, what was the impact? Retrieved January 29, 2021, from https://www.csoonline.com/article/3444488/equifax-data-breach-faq-what-happened-who-was-affected-what-was-the-impact.html
Gurus, T. (2016, November 29). 2017 The Year of the Data Integrity Breach. Retrieved January 29, 2021, from https://www.itsecurityguru.org/2016/11/29/2017-year-data-integrity-breach/
Ram Work:
Data integrity refers to the consistency and accuracy of the data over its full life cycle. Maintaining data integrity is one of the main focus of any organization. Data integrity can be compromised in many ways. It could be human error or unintentional or malicious.
It can also be compromised by transform errors, unintended alterations, compromised hardware such as disk crashes or a device crash, etc. Organizations that are not investing in data integrity will potentially lose their income because of all these errors. Error checking methods and validation procedures are typically relied on to ensure the integrity of data that is transferred or reproduced without the intention of alteration (Brook, 2020).
News about security breaches is becoming pretty usual these days. These data breaches make sense if they happen in only top companies since they hold massive amounts of data, employees, and customers. However, data breaches with smaller organizations are also happening more frequently, which is causing business disruption, financial loss, and consumer anxiety. If we look at the recent incidents, "A dental school in Florida alerted over 300,000 patients about a potential compromise of their personal records after a system intrusion" (). Also, a hospital group in the mid-west notified that 250,000 of their patient's information was stolen, including social security numbers. So, data breaches are happening across many organizations, not just national and international companies. These data breaches include a legal defense team, public relations help, and the cost of the lost business itself.
The Ponemon Institute's "2008 Annual Study: Cost of a Data Breach Study" reported "that the cost of a data breach continues to rise currently averaging $202 per record lost, an increase of 11 percent over the past two years". Based on the industry, this cost may vary from $282 per record at the high end to $131 at the lower end. The study also identified that the average total cost per reporting company was more than $6.6 million per breach.
Assessing the potential impacts of the organization's attacks and data breaches can result in the first step towards building a strong defense against the data breaches. Over the past years, security laws have been updated substantially to protect the integrity and confidentiality of the data. To minimize the data integrity risks, Organizations should know how the data is being created or obtained. Also, organizations should be able to read and understand the data, and the records are permanent. We can also maintain data integrity when organizations should know how data appeared in its initial state and what happened to it throughout the different stages of its lifecycle. "An audit trail is a particularly effective mechanism for minimizing data integrity risk since they are keys for learning what happened to data throughout the different stages of its lifecycle, including where it came from and how it has been transformed or used" (Dev, 2020).
References:
Brook.C. (2020). What is Data Integrity? Definition, Best Practices & More. Retrieved from: https://digitalguardian.com/blog/what-data-integrity-data-protection-101
Ponemon. (2008). "2008 Annual Study: Cost of a Data Breach Study". Retrieved from: https://www.theatlantic.com/static/front/docs/sponsored/zurich/Data_Security_Breaches.pdf
Dev. B. (2020). 8 Ways to Reduce Data Integrity Risk. Retrieved from: https://www.talend.com/resources/reduce-data-integrity-risk/