How PassCamp helps you outsmart data breaches?

Data breaches were predicted to affect a quarter of the world’s population by 2020. That is, roughly 1.5 billion people are likely to experience cybercrime this year.

As 2020 has just reached the mid-year with an average data breach costing $3.92 million, everyone who has not yet taken any precautions, really should. And we mean it.

Luckily, we’re here today to guide you through essential knowledge and steps on how you can increase your chances of outsmarting data breaches.

What can cause a data breach?

There are two main causes that cause most data breaches to happen – human error and poor passwords. Let’s look into the nature of these breaches.

Breaches caused by human error

Analysis, conducted by CybSafe, revealed that 90% of all data breaches in the UK in 2019 happened because of a human error.

“It’s almost always human error that enables attackers to access encrypted channels and sensitive information.” – said Oz Alashe, CEO of CybSafe.

The example of such can be as simple as forwarding a wrong email to a wrong person. However, some other data breaches exist where employees might not even realize something suspicious is happening behind their actions. And these are the eavesdropping attacks.

In short, an eavesdropping attack is a theft of information that is being transmitted from one device (computer, phone, or other device) to another via network. For instance, when you send a password to your colleague via email ( first red flag) while sitting in a cafe, connected to a public wifi ( second red flag), an intruder, without you even noticing, interferes and steals that password before it reaches your colleague. Your sensitive data is stolen without you even realizing what has happened.

Breaches caused by poor passwords

Another type of data breaches are directly related to the quality of passwords. Alarming results from Verizon Data Breach Investigation Report shows that 81% of data breaches happen due to weak, stolen passwords and faulty password management procedures. That is still partially a human mistake, however, the attacks happen without direct human participation (as in insecure data sending or connecting to public wifi) but at any moment.

We’re talking about brute force and rainbow table attacks.

A brute force attack, or a password guessing attack, is a type of attack where an attacker tries out a variety of combinations of common usernames and passwords until they find that perfect match.

A slightly more difficult, but a lot faster attack, is a rainbow table. It is a pre-computed listing, a database, that is used to gain access by cracking a password hash. (Read more about hash and different levels of password security here). Once a hacker finds the victim’s hashed password, he can easily reveal the real plaintext password.

Note: these attacks are extremely dangerous when you reuse passwords on multiple platforms.

How to outsmart data breaches?

It all starts with using a reliable password manager, such as PassCamp. This tool focuses on uncompromised protection of your data using the most advanced features such as Master Password, encryption, and secure authentication. Plus, it helps you to easily build right password habits so that a breach doesn’t even happen.

Build habits: Generate a password and use 2FA

To outsmart a brute force attack, we strongly encourage you to generate a password each time you add a new account. A long password of random symbols makes it very hard for an adversary to crack, since a secure generated password will never be a common ‘123456’ or ‘qwerty’.

In fact, we made this process super easy – all it takes to generate a secure password is a click!

Also, always use a Two-Factor Authentication – this way a hacker won’t be able to access your account without you confirming the access first – even if you’d lose your device, your data will still be secure and inaccessible to adversaries.

Avoid human mistakes

Always work connected to a secure network and, most importantly, get used to sharing sensitive data via secure, encrypted tools. Luckily, it’s all taken care of for you.

In PassCamp, it is easy to share passwords with others in a secure way – all your data is encrypted and unreachable when sending – so that no eavesdropping attacker wouldn’t be able to intervene.

Finally, with secure tools that are designed to build new habits easily – use 2FA, generate a password and share data securely – increasing your chances to outsmart data breaches becomes almost effortless.

Start using PassCamp password manager today and reduce the chances of you becoming a part of the alarming 2020 predictions.