What Do the Recent Email Breaches and Cyber Attacks Mean for Business?

2018 saw a significant number of email breaches and successful cyber attacks against some of the biggest companies in the world including Facebook, Marriott, Quora, Ticketmaster, and British Airways.

These companies hold a massive amount of personal data of their users and such breaches have caused the email addresses and other personal details to get into the hands of cybercriminals.

The 2019 year so far has already a long list of data breaches. The hackers continue to be targeting mostly the financial data, but also other targets like healthcare and social services. The No. 1 danger of this data breaches is identity theft. Scammers stole personal data like email address, date of birth, credit card details, user names, passwords, social security number, etc, so they can perform sophisticated phishing attempts.

People need to aware of the importance of protecting their personal information to avoid being a victim of hackers.

Massive Email Breaches in 2019

The beginning of the year saw one of the most extensive public data breaches ever – a collection that contained more than 87 gigabytes of data – all of which leaked online.

The so-called Collection #1 contained more than 772 million email addresses and more than 21 million passwords, all of which was released on the cloud service Mega.

This already infamous event was discovered by a security researcher Troy Hunt, who founded the Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) website that checks which emails and passwords appeared on the web, i.e., if your data was breached.

Later it turned out that more of these collections of emails and passwords released on the dark web where they ended up for sale. Collections #2 through #5 contained three times as much data as Collection #1, after removing all the duplicates.

If that wasn’t enough, another similarly sized breach to Collection #1 occurred in February. There’s still not enough details on the offense, but it seems that this time some 763 million emails were exposed. This time, emails were collected from the email address validation service called verifications.io and no passwords were included, but there was a lot of other personal information like IP addresses, phone numbers, names, and more.

What Does This Mean for Businesses?

Any email breach or some other successful cyber attack can affect a business in several negative ways.

Besides,  if a breach is discovered, a business can lose respect and trust that their customers place in them. And there can be more substantial and tangible losses as well.

According to allBusiness, a business that suffers a breach can potentially lose more than 20% of their revenue, they can also lose possible business opportunities, and they can lose some of their customers completely.

Naturally, none of this is for sure, but the possibility of any of these outcomes should be more than enough to get you to worry about your cybersecurity measures and especially your email security.

You need to invest more in educating your employees on what they can do to protect themselves and thus the company. Everyone needs to be careful with company data, and they especially need to be careful with how they use their emails – by being more cautious with the email they receive.

What’s more, you can also improve your security measure by getting better antivirus software, stronger firewalls, and most importantly – upgraded email protection software.

By ensuring your company is more secure, you can establish that no email breach or any other cyber attack occurs in your company. Be protected from 3rd party vulnerabilities with Anubisnetworks Mail Protection Service. Claim your Free Trial Today!