Recent severe data breaches have been disastrous for extramarital affair site Ashley Madison. Discretion has been one of the company’s key selling points, and in a television interview last year, CEO Noel Biderman described the company's servers as "kind of untouchable."
However, despite Biderman’s faith that his servers would stay the course of any onslaught that faced them, it was confirmed this week that hacking group Impact Team has definitely been touching his, and it would appear everybody else’s, sensitive data.
The group released two bundles of information to the dark Web. This includes names, email addresses and bank details of current and previous members of the site, as well as source code for apps the company has developed and emails from the company’s CEO.
Whilst the data has been released in a large and technically complex database, the fact that it is in the public domain at all has massively increased the pressure on the organization’s already strained parent company, Avid Life Media Inc.
While your organization may not handle data as intimate as Ashley Madison does, this kind of security nightmare will be all too familiar for some organizations. Since 2012, 14% of companies have experienced and reported a data breach. These incidents can have severe consequences including:
- Loss of valuable information
- Loss of customer confidence
- Bad publicity
- Excess litigation costs
Customer confidence is fundamental to the success of any organization, but could not be more crucial than in the online marketplace. Users trust websites with their most private information (addresses, bank details, affair partners) and will lose complete confidence in organizations that mismanage that information.
Successful information governance is built upon a successful management system. EQMS software consolidates and integrates governance, risk management and compliance initiatives across your organization with a single solution.
With steadfast security and built-in compliance, EQMS Document Manager delivers absolute control over your critical documentation. Document Manager helps to clear your system of redundant data by ensuring that users only access the latest version of important documents and prevent the use of inaccurate and out-of-date material.
You can manage security breaches, data leaks and other business risks easily and efficiently with EQMS Risk Manager.
Easily configured to support your risk and control framework to address both Operational and Enterprise risks, EQMS Risk Manager enables you to control and manage risks with complete confidence.
Learn more about EQMS software here, or follow the link below.
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