According to the OAIC (the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner), ransomware-related data breaches rose by 24%. As Australian Information Commissioner and Privacy Commissioner claims, assessing the number of breaches and their quality is not easy when it comes to ransomware. This type of threat is nearly untraceable – what information gets accessed or extracted, thus the probability of high percentage of unreported ransomware incidents is massive.

The commissioner ensures that deploying special tools for internal control as well as introducing exigent practices, which would promote transparent data storage policies and bring confidentiality of personal and corporate data to a sufficient safety level, can improve the situation significantly.

How to protect personal data

Identity theft is a major issue, as many data breaches occur due to impersonation of an authorised account keeper by stealing his or her personal details and gaining access to the network or exact location.

Companies are encouraged to improve monitoring measures as failure to report an incident to regulators can seriously impact their reputational and financial wellbeing.

Human error is the cause of 30% of information security incident notifications, whereas malicious intent accounts for 65% of data breach reporting.

The most common type of compromised data appeared to be contact information – 91%.

72% of organisations could report an incident to the OAIC only within a month.

In South Africa companies now face an increase, the quickest in six years, in the cost of a data breach. $3 million is the average sum a company has to pay in case of a security incident.

The statistics is based on the 2021 Cost of a Data Breach Report. All of the factors are included in the cost – regulatory, technical, reputational and pertinent to overall performance efficiency.

The pandemic affected operational ways settled before in a company and made the cost of a breach jump by 15%.

The average increase in other countries around the world amounted up to 10%. 60% of companies had to augment cloud services usage amid lockdown.

Specialists blame it on the necessity to use less controlled environments and tools in such a situation. The world has been preparing on the go, and sometimes quite successfully in a way, but the consequences are showing today and will still have impact.

Which services to use when the transition to a new mode of work happens all of a sudden – learn more about how to keep your data safe and don’t spend on extra infrastructure.

Organisations are urged to introduce the advanced internal control instruments enabling proper monitoring of data at rest and in motion. The alerts to violations should be automated and customer, employee, corporate data must be the focus of equal attention.

Bigger security incidents occurred in companies which took no measures to boost their corporate perimeter – the impact was $660 000 higher for those who didn’t take care enough while shifting the workflow. Entities which deployed information security solutions and adapted better lost $1.6 million less than those who didn’t.