Understanding Online Security Breach in the Context of Cybersecurity

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When somebody smashes your window and climbs into your house, it is called a security breach. Similarly, when the intruder steals your personal information and documents and then vanishes away by climbing back out of your window, it is called a data breach. As a matter of fact, security breaches or data breaches or popularly called as online security breaches are common happenings nowadays may not be in your houses but often in big or small organizations or business groups around the world. The security breach or a data breach has the potential or ability to harm the finances as well as damage the reputation of organizations.

Sometimes, security breaches or data breaches happen on a massive scale. One such massive data breaches are the Equifax data breach where the personal information of 145 million Americans was accessed by the hackers in 2017. Similarly, another massive data breach was the Yahoo data breaches which exposed 3 billion user accounts as per the report of Yahoo.

As per the definition of a security breach or data breach, a security breach happens when a hacker or intruder gets unauthorised access to the protected data and systems of an organization. The malicious applications or hackers ignore and bypass the security measures and mechanisms of the system in order to access restricted areas and eventually damage the system and cause the data loss.

The cybercriminals can do different types of data breaches such as virus-based data breach, spyware-based data breach and malware-based data breach. They often use malicious software to access restricted and protected areas of systems and networks. The viruses, spyware and malware usually are sent through email by the attackers or sometimes they are downloaded from the internet.

For example, often you may be getting emails from unknown sources with the attachment of texts files or image or audio-video files. The moment you download and open those files your computer, as well as email account, gets hacked and infected. Similarly, instead of emails if you download or open or run any unknown malicious program from the internet which is infected, eventually your computer will be infected.

If your computer is infected through a virus, it can ultimately spread across the network and infection will be circulated across all the computers in the network. In some cases, the attackers send emails to employees which looks authentic and convincing from a genuine executive. The attackers then ask for log-in information, data and records and passwords for any urgency. If these details are provided to them, the attacker hacks the computer as well as the network.