The Best Data Breach Tactics to Deploy Now
A top-of-mind question for business leaders across all industries is how to eliminate the risk of a data breach. In addition to removing sensitive data from your business process, there are two other tactics you should deploy: application-level encryption and strong authentication.
Though it is generally accepted that encrypting sensitive data will protect your organization, most people in the security business don’t realize that not all encryption is equal. Even when using NIST-approved algorithms with the largest key sizes available, data is still at risk.
How is that possible? Well, all other things being equal in the cryptographic sense, two design decisions matter when encrypting data: 1) Where the data is being cryptographically processed and 2) How are cryptographic keys being managed?
First, let’s address processing. If data is encrypted and decrypted in any part of the system (e.g., the hard disk drive, operating system, database) other than the business application using that data, significant residual risks remain despite the encryption.
An attacker needs to only compromise a software layer above the encrypting layer to see unencrypted (plaintext) data, because the decrypting layer below will already have decrypted the sensitive data before sending it to layer above in the stack.
Since the application layer is the highest layer in the technology stack, this makes it the most logical place to protect sensitive data, as it affords the attacker the smallest target (in order to compromise sensitive data within the application layer, the attacker will have had to find a vulnerability within the application – or the administrator’s credential – and access regions of memory accessible only to the application or the administrator).
This also ensures that, once data leaves the application layer, it is protected no matter where it goes (and conversely, must come back to the application layer to be decrypted).
