JOPLIN, Mo. – According to the identity theft resource center, through September 30th of this year, the number of data breaches is up 17% compared to 2020. We spoke with a local cyber security expert about what businesses should do to protect their systems.
1,291…that’s the number of data breaches *so far* in 2021. That’s compared to 1,108 in 2020 according to the identity theft resource center. John Motazedi, CEO of SNC Squared says “That actually to me is surprisingly low, we actually were expecting, we’re tracking to seem to be tracking a little bit higher than they expected, we saw kinda a dip in 2020 because of COVID, the bad guys were also taking some time off because of COVID, so it seems like this year they’re kind of back with a vengeance.”
According to a report from IBM, the average cost of a data breach for a company was $4.24 million, the highest in the last 17 years the report has been put together. Those are costs, that could be avoided. “Some of the best things is to really get phenomenal backups and by that we mean you want to have what we call an airgap between where your data and where your backups are actually stored, good protection, employee education is substantial just to make sure that employees are not clicking on things that are inappropriate, good password management is absolutely key.”
As for the number of people impacted by these breaches, that number is at 281 million so far this year. So we asked John what you can do to protect yourself, incase a place you do business with is hit with a cyber attack. “You’re limited at what you can do, so, maybe some identity protection would be important, so if you get breached, reach out to the company that had the breach and see if they can provide you some free identity protection or fraud protection on your behalf.”
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