Credit checking company Equifax admitted it was the victim of a large scale cyber attack, where personal details of 143 million customers, including British citizens, were compromised. Aside from the data loss, Equifax will have to address the cost of fixing the breach, which according to my client EfficientIP, a provider of network and security technology, will be north of $2 million.
Hervé Dhelin, VP Strategy at EfficientIP believes the lack of basic planning is set to cause more breaches. He said:
“It’s troubling to hear personal data belonging to 143 million people were compromised by the Equifax cyber attack. Our trust in the security is being questioned because an organisation who prides itself on protecting sensitive data has been brought down. From our research, we know a large organisation on average spends over $2 million per year fixing the damage caused by cyber breaches and it looks like the cost for Equifax will be higher than that. Enterprises are still missing out on the basics when it comes to protecting their networks and data, almost all US organizations (98%) we spoke did not apply the necessary security patches (compared to 83% globally) and only 86 percent applied half of the required patches on their DNS servers.”
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Article Link: http://digitalforensicsmagazine.com/blogs/?p=2210