Data Privacy & Protection

Your personal information is not safe on the Internet. Data breaches occur almost daily, exposing our email addresses, passwords, credit card numbers, social security numbers and other highly sensitive data.

If encryption is so inviolable, why do businesses and governments keep getting their data hacked? The answer is simple: almost everyone is doing data protection wrong.

This article focuses on data stored in a database on any cloud platform. The article highlights the main existing problems related to data protection in a database that cause data breaches. This guide provides you with information on why data breaches happen, how to prevent such threats and how to protect data even if your database was compromised.

Let’s think for a while how businesses see a modern application:

  • Secure, fast and convenient application
  • Super protected database and data in it
  • Restricted users access to specific data
  • All data can be easily restored after any disaster
  • The application can be run on any device and browser
  • Application data can be securely shared with 3rd party

It seems like nothing is extraordinary and everything can be achieved using cryptography and rules, doesn’t it?

Before moving on, let’s define what data is and what types of data there are.

Data vs. Information

Data is any kind of information that includes text, files, audio and video, as well as logs and other system records that have been translated into a form that is efficient for movement or processing, and every data is related to a person, system or organization in some fields like social, healthcare, governmental, educational, etc.

Data ownership. The state of having total control and legal rights over every single item or set of data elements is called data ownership. It defines and provides information about the legal owner of a particular data asset and the policy on its use, collection, and dissemination implemented by the data owner.

Data remanence are residual representations of the data that remain after deleting files or reformatting the storage devices. Operating systems usually delete files logically, leaving them physically in storage. It is also theoretically possible to recover data that has rarely been overwritten using methods such as magnetic microscopy.

All data in an information system can be divided into two types:

  • Sensitive information is data that must be protected from unauthorized access to secure the privacy or security of a person or organization.
  • Personal non-sensitive information - de-identified information, maintained in a way that does not allow association with a specific person, therefore is not considered to be sensitive.

Sensitive Information

There are three types of sensitive information:

  • Personally Identifiable Information (PII): this is some data that can be tracked to the individual, and if they are disclosed, can harm this person. Such information includes full name, biological or personal characteristics, such as an image of distinguishing features, fingerprints, x-rays, voice signature, retina scan, or geometry of the face, medical information, personally identifiable financial information (PIFI), unique identifiers such as passport or Social Security numbers (SSN), asset information, such as MAC address or IP.
  • Business Information: Sensitive business information includes everything that poses a risk to the company if a competitor or the general public discovers it. That information includes trade secrets, acquisition plans, financial data and information about suppliers and customers, as well as other options.
  • Classified Information: Classified information refers to a government agency and is limited in accordance with the level of sensitivity (for example, limited, confidential, secret, and top-secret). When the risk of harm has been passed or reduced, classified information may be declassified and possibly made public.

Industry Information

Also, nowadays, all data (information) can be sorted and named depending on the industry where it’s used, and what or whom it characterizes.

  • Credit Card or Payment Card Industry (PCI) - information related to credit, debit, or other payment cards and is governed by the Payment Card Industry.
  • IT Security (ITS) - information that is generated as a result of automatic or manual processes designed to protect universal IT resources, including settings, configurations, reports, log data, and other information that supports IT security operations.
  • Protected Health Information (PHI) - information regulated by the Health Insurance Mobility and Accountability Act (HIPAA). PHI is individually identifiable medical information that relates to a person’s physical or mental health or condition, health insurance, or payment for a person’s medical care. The following PII, combined with this person’s health information, creates the following PHI: names, phone numbers, email addresses, SSNs, medical card numbers, beneficiary numbers of the health plan, car number, URL and any other unique identification numbers, characteristics, code or combination that allows you to identify a person.

Data Security vs. Information Security

Information security is a set of measures of prevention of unauthorized access, usage, disruption, modification or destruction of any information. Data security is a set of measures of prevention of unauthorized access, utilization, disruption, alteration or destruction of data in storage.

Information Security

Information security, often referred to as InfoSec, refers to the processes and frameworks, tools designed and deployed to protect data from unauthorized modification, disruption, destruction, and inspection.

The classic information security model defines three security objectives: maintaining confidentiality, integrity and accessibility.

  • Data Confidentiality. It’s a set of tools and rules that limits access to information, and data encryption is a standard method of ensuring confidentiality. Measures taken to ensure confidentiality are aimed at preventing sensitive information from getting to the wrong people while ensuring that the right people can get it. Examples of confidentiality of electronic data being compromised include laptop theft, password theft, or sensitive emails being sent to the incorrect individuals.
  • Data Integrity. It’s the assurance that the information is trustworthy and accurate. Integrity means maintaining consistency, accuracy and reliability of data throughout its life cycle. The data should not be changed during transportation or storage, and steps should be taken to ensure that the data cannot be modified by unauthorized people (for example, in case of confidentiality breach).
  • Data Availability. It’s a guarantee of persistent, reliable access to the information by authorized people. Typically, data availability calls for implementing products, services, policies and procedures that ensure that data is available in regular and even in disaster recovery operations. If an attacker cannot compromise the first two elements of data security (confidentiality and integrity), he can try to perform attacks such as the denial of service, which will lead to server shutdown, which will make the site inaccessible to legitimate users due to lack of accessibility.

Types of InfoSec

  • Application Security. Application security is a set of software, hardware, and procedural methods to protect applications from external threats. Once thinking about software development, security is becoming an increasingly important issue in the development process, as apps are becoming more accessible over networks and, as a result, vulnerable to a wide range of threats. Security measures built into applications and reliable application protection procedures minimize the chances that unauthorized code will be able to use applications to access, steal, modify or delete sensitive data.
  • Cloud Security. Cloud security focuses on the creation and deployment of secure applications in cloud environments and safe interaction with third-party cloud applications. “Cloud” means that the application runs in a shared environment. Enterprises must ensure that there is isolation between common processes in common environments.
  • Cryptography. Data encryption during transmission and data at rest help ensure data privacy and integrity. Digital signatures are used in cryptography to authenticate data. Therefore, cryptography and encryption have become increasingly important for information security.
  • Infrastructure Security. Infrastructure security refers to the protection of internal and external networks, laboratories, data centers, servers, desktop computers and mobile devices.

Data Protection vs. Data Security

The terms protection and security are often used interchangeably, but although they have some things in common, they entail distinct processes and results. In the digital world, protection and security are more complex because data has unique attributes and challenges.

Data protection is a mechanism for creating copies of your data to recover in the event of loss or damage, whereas data security refers to a mechanism for protecting your data from unauthorized access and distribution.

Data security protects your data from unauthorized access that could result in comprised data, corruption, or deletion. Should your data security strategy fail, data protection facilitates the recovery of clean data copies.

Data Privacy vs. Data Security

Data Privacy can’t exist without Data Protection and Data Security. While you can have data protection without data privacy, you can’t have data privacy without data protection.

SecurityPrivacy
DefinitionProtection of people, assets and information harm or abuseFreedom from being observed or disturbed
RelationshipSecurity defends privacyPrivacy requires security

There are some distinct differences between Data Security and Data Privacy:

  • Data Security protects data from being compromised by external attackers and attackers. It refers to protective measures of digital privacy, which are used to prevent unauthorized access to any resources, such as the cloud, databases and websites. Data security also protects data from corruption.
Examples of data security technologies include backups, data masking and data erasure. A key data security technology measure is encryption, where digital data, software/hardware, and hard drives are encrypted and therefore rendered unreadable to unauthorized users and hackers.
  • Data Privacy is also called information privacy, the aspect of information technology that refers to the ability of an organization or an individual to determine what data in a computer system can be transferred to third parties.
Data privacy also includes the regulations required for companies to protect data. Organizations generally believe that protecting sensitive data from hackers means that they automatically comply with data privacy rules. As the number of data protection rules in the world grows, global and privacy requirements will also expand and change. However, the only constant is adequate data protection: this is the best way to ensure that companies comply with the law and guarantee the confidentiality of information.

Data Privacy Acts and Laws

Fortunately, lawmakers have recognized the importance of regulating data privacy and the need to hold companies accountable for end-user data. Companies must now determine what actions and data privacy laws affect their users. For example, you should know where the data comes from (country and state), what personally identifiable information it may contain, and usage methodology.

Let’s take a closer look at how the most recent data privacy regulations impact users and companies.

GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)

GDPR came into force in May 2018. It aims to protect the personal data of EU citizens. There are many actions that companies must take to comply with the requirements, including, but not limited to: explicit opt-in consent, the right to request their data, the right to delete their data.

The GDPR provides consumers with certain rights to their data, as well as imposes security obligations on companies that store their data. For companies, one of the challenging aspects of GDPR is the requirement to respond to a subject access request. The reality is that most organizations cannot easily find, provide or delete an individual’s personal data upon request.

HIPAA (Health Information Privacy and Portability Act)

While the GDPR is in act in the EU, one of the most important data protection and privacy laws at the federal level in the US is HIPAA — a data privacy regulation that has been ratified to protect patient personal health information.

The purpose of the Privacy Rule is to guarantee that a patient’s medical information is appropriately protected, allowing its subjects to process the medical information as necessary, provide high-quality medical care while protecting medical records and patient care.

GLBA (Gramm-leach-Bliley Act)

Another rule that you should be aware of is GLBA. GLBA requires financial institutions to protect consumer financial data in the US.

The benefits of achieving GLBA compliance are numerous. It reduces potential fines and damage to reputation due to unauthorized exchanges or loss of confidential financial data.

CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act)

California companies must be ready by January 1, 2020 for the CCPA, which will require them to identify and discover personal information, complete requests for access to data subjects, and protect consumer data.

CCPA gives consumers the right to control how companies collect and use their personal data. It means that companies must be able to quickly and accurately locate and classify sensitive data so that they can identify the data subject to CPPA and fulfill data access requests (DSARs).

Data Storage

Data Storage is the maintenance of information using technology specifically designed to store this data and ensure its availability as necessary. The most common types of data storage are file storage, block storage, and object storage, each of which is ideal for a variety of purposes.

Cloud Storage is defined as “online data storage in the cloud”, in which data is stored in and accessible from several distributed and related resources that constitute the cloud. Cloud storage provides the benefits of greater availability and reliability; quick deployment; reliable protection for backup, archiving and disaster recovery of data; and reduced overall storage costs as a result of the lack of the need to buy, manage and maintain expensive equipment. Using cloud storage has many advantages, but cloud storage has the potential for security and compliance issues that are not related to traditional storage systems. Examples of service providers are Amazon S3, Google Drive, Sky Drive, etc.

Database (DB) is a data collection that is organized in such a way that it can be easily accessed, managed and updated. Databases typically contain sets of data records or files containing information about sales transactions or interactions with specific customers.

Cloud Database is a set of data (content), structured or unstructured, that is located on the platform of a private, public or hybrid cloud computing infrastructure. In terms of structure and design, the cloud database is no different from the one that runs on a business's own on-premises servers. Examples of cloud databases are Amazon Aurora, PostgreSQL, MySQL, MariaDB, Oracle Database, Google Cloud SQL, etc.

Cloud Data Storage Protection (Security) is a type of data protection model used to protect stored, static and moving data in the cloud, including data in a database. It is designed to implement optimal data storage, protection and security methodologies. Cloud data protection must provide the classic model for information (data) security defining three objectives of security: maintaining confidentiality, integrity, and availability. Protecting the confidential data in a database the actual database security.

Data Breaches: Threats & Causes

Protecting customer data is much less expensive than dealing with a security breach in which records are exposed and potentially misused.

Data Breach is a security incident involving the unauthorized disclosure of private and sensitive information. The most common scenario is when a cybercriminal infiltrates a database and puts sensitive data at risk, whether by simply viewing this data or copying, transferring or using it in any way. Data breaches can disclose personal information, financial information, such as credit card numbers from individuals and corporate secrets, their software codes, and even intellectual property.

After hacking data, losses can be caused by an attacker impersonating someone from the target network and gaining access to otherwise secure networks. In case of a regulatory violation, the organization that has suffered a data violation may be fined legally.

Why do data breaches happen? Let's look at common database threats and their causes to find the answer.

Common Threats & Causes

In general, there are two kinds of threats to your databases: external and internal.

Business owners can never be entirely sure of the loyalty of their employees, regardless of what security software they use and how responsible they are. Someone in your organization who has access to sensitive data may steal and sell it to third parties.

Databases are becoming an increasingly integral part of organizations' success and are increasingly exposed to potential threats. Although news reports deal with sophisticated external attacks, many internal and external factors can jeopardize the database.

Internal Attacks. Although internal failures often undermine databases, intentional cyber criminals on the inside commit the majority of database violations. Many of them are disgruntled employees who use their privileged access to harm their employers. Others are cybercriminals who work for foreign intelligence or hope to sell information on the black market. Malicious insiders with full access are hard to stop.

External Attacks. The most frightening attacks are carried out by experienced and experienced external hackers. These attackers can find network vulnerabilities or socially manipulate insiders to overcome the protection of the external network and, as a result, obtain databases. Because the organization’s software applications support open connections to IT databases, hackers typically gain control of these applications after they access them, often by looking for application passwords.

Here's a short list of major causes for data breaches:

#Threats & Causes
1Weak and unprotected passwords
2Hash doesn’t make passwords protected
3Key theft
4Poor encryption and data breach come together
5Using the wrong cipher modes and encryption algorithms
6Wrong key management
7Insecure database backups
8Insecure shared sensitive data
9Lack of post-compromised security
10Relying on cloud providers to secure data
11Believing that regulatory compliance means you’re secure
12Not knowing who uses what sensitive data
13Limitless database access
14Human error
15SQL injections

1. Weak and unprotected passwords

We all heard password warnings. Never give your password. Never use the vendor default passwords. Never use easy-to-guess passwords (like Password1234 or Dim1982). Regardless of what industry you work in, chances are you'll hear more about these “rules” for passwords at your work. Sure thing, sometimes we create and remember a complex password, but there are many systems around, and we begin to use the same password everywhere. The problem is not only with people, but the way that most services are storing and protecting passwords is fundamentally flawed.

But while most people and platforms do their best to follow password security guidelines, many are still not sure why these password protocols are even effective. Today, there are a lot of methods used to break into a password-protected system. An attacker who has gained access to the password database can first launch an offline dictionary attack to obtain user passwords, and then log in as these users and “legitimately” ask the Internet provider to decrypt. Worse, an insider or persistent attacker who receives a decryption key can download the entire database and perform offline decryption to recover passwords. Take a look at Virgil Blog post to read more about service’s vulnerability to such attacks.

Do you think there’s no way to prevent this? It exists, and it's much easier than you think. You will find out more about this solution in the password-hardened encryption section.

2. Hash doesn’t make passwords protected

To prevent hackers from stealing password databases, most servers use a cryptographic method called hashing. This method involves running the password through a hash algorithm that produces a unique value based on the password and stores the hash value instead of the password itself. But why hashing is not good enough? Hackers can find ways around hashed password databases.

There are tables with a lot of hash lookups. If attackers get a hash, how long does it take to figure out what the password is? The attack is called a ‘rainbow table attack’, a lookup to a database that has all the passwords, or “all the colors of the rainbow”. Attackers don’t even need to pick the hash algorithm. If they get access to a hash, they can reverse it into the password. If they know what hash you’re using, they can brute-force with just the hash version of the password.

Adding a salt? Salt may prevent rainbow table attacks, as long as there isn’t a new rainbow table for the hash and salt combo, and also your database can be breached using brute force attack. For valuable data that can be sold on dark web, such as medical records, it is worth the effort.

So, how do we fix this? We suggest using Virgil PureKit password-hardened encryption as a more cryptographic solution that prevents attacks on passwords.

3. Key theft

It's okay if you encrypt sensitive data, but it’s also essential to pay attention to who exactly has access to the keys. Since keys are often stored on someone’s hard drive, it’s obvious that this is a simple target for those who want to steal them. If you leave such valuable software security tools unprotected, keep in mind that this makes your system vulnerable to attacks.

The easiest way for a hacker to bypass encryption schemes is to steal the key. If a hacker manages to plant a keylogger on your system, he can record your activities, including the generation or use of cryptographic keys. In addition, some forms of malware enable the controller to browse the contents of your hard drive, so if you store cryptographic keys and passwords in plain text, they could be vulnerable. Keeping your operating system, firewall and anti-malware programs up to date will not help you to prevent this type of attack.

Too late to walk in waving the white flag, don't you think? But we know how to prevent key theft using Virgil PureKit.

4. Poor encryption and data breach come together

In some cases, the level of cryptographic security may be insufficient to prevent a brute force attack. A brute force attack requires trying every possible key to break an encryption scheme, and it can take an extremely long time to succeed. To facilitate this kind of attack, hackers can take over other computers, devoting their processing power to the attempt to break through an encryption scheme.

You can consider the database a backend part of your set-up and focus more on eliminating Internet threats. This is not entirely true. Databases have network interfaces that can be easily monitored by hackers if your software has low security. To avoid such situations, it is crucial to use encrypted communication.

Safeguarding your sensitive data with low-level encryption solutions, like disk or file encryption, may seem tempting with one click. However, many organizations rely solely on these decisions, which is completely dangerous. To begin with, disk encryption is only enabled when the server is turned off. While the server is turned on, the operating system decrypts sensitive data for everyone who is logged in, including malefactors.

Going one level up to file encryption, you come across a popular feature called SQL Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), which is used to encrypt Microsoft and Oracle database files with a single click of a switch. However, as with disk encryption, this security feature is completely ignored by a hacker who manages to log into your database. Only the file your database is stored in on a physical disk is encrypted, so if someone does not go to the data center to steal your physical disk, this will not give you much protection.

5. Using the wrong cipher modes and encryption algorithms

Take a look at this list of cryptographic algorithms on Wikipedia. Now consider the various block cipher modes to choose from. Here is a StackOverflow post about which mode to use with AES. The fact is that the developer can choose from many options when he is asked to "encrypt our sensitive data, please." A common question for developers: is not every application environment delivered with an encryption library?

There are a lot of misleading information on the Internet, and there are many ways to make mistakes:

  • Using random numbers that are not cryptographically secure
  • Using AES-ECB mode for data larger than 128 bits
  • Reuse of the initialization vector (IV), which can negate the entire encryption process
  • Using deterministic encryption to search for sensitive data without dictionary attacks.

These examples are just a small part of the sheer number of encryption dangers.

With Virgil PureKit you can be sure your digital security and focus on building features that give you a competitive market advantage while end-users can enjoy the privacy and security they increasingly demand.

6. Wrong key management

Mismanagement of keys is usually the most common way for hackers to receive sensitive sensitive data, even if they have been properly encrypted. It is tantamount to buying the best lock in the world and leaving the key under the mat. If the hackers receive your encrypted data and encryption key, the game is over. Let's look at some key management issues.

Storing the key under the mat. Let's assume that all your sensitive data is now encrypted and properly signed. Where did you put your encryption key? Some common options:

  • In the database - BAD
  • On the file system - BAD
  • In an application config file - BAD

Do not forget, we must assume that hackers have already gotten into your database and application server, so you can not store your key there. But most developers do.

Leaving the key unprotected. Even if you find a separate place to store the key, this still isn't enough, because hackers might also get there. Thus, you need to encrypt the encryption key itself with another encryption key, usually called the Key Encryption Key (KEK), which then needs to be stored in a completely different place. For even greater security, you can go one level higher and protect your KEKs with the Master Encryption Key and a Master Signing Key. Developers don't usually add as many levels of encryption. But they should.

Fetching the key insecurely. Even with the three layers of encryption protecting your data, there is still the problem of securely transmitting the key to your application. Ideally, this includes authentication between your application and the key management server, as well as delivery over an encrypted connection - the fourth layer of encryption. There are also performance considerations, such as secure key caching in memory, which can be difficult.

Using the same key for all your data. Do you use the same key for your home, car and office? Of course not. So why would you need to use one encryption key for all your sensitive data? You should split your data into several security sections, each with its own encryption key. This is a difficult task because it requires you to intelligently determine which key to retrieve each time you encrypt and decrypt data. Therefore, most developers skip this step.

Never changing the key. Everyone knows that periodically it is recommended to change the locks, and the same can be said about encryption. This is called key rotation, and it is not trivial. It is required to support several versions of each encryption key and correlate it with the corresponding version of the encrypted data. In some cases, you must transfer existing data from the old key to the new key, which is even more complicated. Again, most developers completely skip this step and never change their encryption keys.

You might think it's too hard to do this, and you're right. This is why we developed Virgil PureKit framework that allows you to create and manage encryption keys easily.

7. Insecure database backups

Your backups contain the same data as the production databases, and must be protected with the same care as the server itself. This may mean blocking backup directories, restricting access to the server or storage where data is stored, physical security of removable media, accessing networks for backup, and checking who has access to perform and access backups. Just remember that backups are part of your data ecosystem when it comes to security, and someone can just go through an open window to get around a barricaded door.

When backing up to the cloud, you need to consider many security issues. After the backup data has been deleted from your cloud provider - whether it is a single file or the entire set of backups - are they completely deleted or do they remain on the network permanently? This can create obligations for data storage and electronic discovery. Is the data encrypted after downloading? This is usually the case and not a big problem that you need to deal with. Is the data encrypted in transit?

That's why it is recommended that you back up your data with strict controls on data encryption, access, and other advanced data backup protection methods, and Virgil PureKit can help you with this super important task.

8. Insecure shared sensitive data

The main point of each Cloud Platform is a possibility to maintain and share data remotely, we always share data with our friends, doctors, cloud services, insurance providers, social application, or just keep data for ourselves. As a result, the amount of data is growing and growing, and we began to lose our data, we don't remember who has access and to which data, and even if we want to restrict access to data for bad guys, we can’t do this.

Nowadays, the data privacy regulatory acts say that application’s developers have to use and share users’ data in the most secure way, and pay money in case they lost the data. You may think it easy to solve while using cryptography, but let's bring back to the key management problems from the previous step.

But do be afraid, these are lots of techniques that help in anonymising and protecting data.

9. Lack of post-compromised security

Post-compromised security is a possibility to prevent data breaches even if data storage has been compromised.

Storing sensitive data, such as user PII, healthcare data, and financial records, in a database is risky but typically necessary. Beyond the obvious access control protection methods, encryption is the next line of defense in most systems. However, any form of encryption is only as strong as the methods used to protect the encryption key, and most systems still struggle to truly separate the protected data from a key or other decryption method. For example, an attacker who has gained access to a password database may first launch an offline dictionary attack to obtain user passwords, and then log in as these users and “legitimately” request decryption from the online service provider. Even worse, an internal or persistent attacker who receives a decryption key can load the entire database and perform offline decryption.

To fully defend against compromised attacks, companies have to implement post-compromised security mechanisms into their data storage, to completely separate encrypted data from the decryption functionality.

10. Relying on cloud providers to secure data

With the rise of cloud computing, more and more server applications have moved from server rooms to data centers located around the world under the control of companies such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google. These tech giants are investing hundreds of millions of dollars in cybersecurity to position themselves as "THE" secure cloud. All this makes many organizations assume that any data stored by these providers is ironclad. This is a risky assumption.

The physical infrastructure that most cloud providers provide is secure, and some even offer encryption options. But they usually recommend developers to encrypt their sensitive data before storing it in the cloud. Amazon Web Services (AWS) even includes the diagram below to emphasize that data encryption is the responsibility of the client, not theirs:

As you can see, a massive amount of data security responsibilities are shouldered upon you. And this is true of any cloud provider.

11. Believing that regulatory compliance means you’re secure

Of course, HIPAA, PCI, CJIS and other regulatory specifications require the protection of your sensitive data. But they did not go into details about how you should do this. Some do not even mention encryption at all.

There are many ways to make a mistake in protecting data, and these recommendations will not help you make sure that you understand it correctly. Worse, many development teams that add encryption to their code think they're done when they reach the minimum level of security needed for a regulatory checkmark. This “checkmark” mentality regarding data security is dangerous.

12. Not knowing who uses what sensitive data

The Thycotic 2017 State of Cybersecurity Metrics Annual Report highlights that 4 out of 5 organizations do not know where their sensitive data is located and how to protect it.

If 3rd parties had access to data using cryptography and secret key management, organizations could completely control data usage by the 3rd parties.

13. Limitless database access

Remember that Data Privacy cannot exist without Data Security. Database users, like users on any system, should have as much access as they need to perform their duties, this should be the rule for each administrator. Avoid database's "ALL" grants and membership as a system administrator, if possible.

Consider providing read access to views, rather than directly to tables, to protect sensitive fields. Stored procedures, maintenance plans, and other automated tasks should be run as dedicated users with the appropriate set of permissions. This measure prevents the destruction of the entire system by any one element of the database server or by any malicious or compromised user. Often applications instructions, will have you provide your users with the full access administrator role. This is contrary to generally accepted practice and usually represents either careless programming that requires more access than it should, or a desire to remove protection for support reasons, and none of them takes into account the interests of your data, so always consider how the implementation of application accounts can affect your overall resiliency.

14. Human error

While most organizations restrict access to database to those who need it, security can become a victim of human error. For example, an employee can copy information from the entire database table into an email to troubleshoot and accidentally include external email addresses in the recipient list. Information in the database is not always compromised by purely electronic means.

Such catastrophe could have been prevented using end-to-end encryption. Even if someone receives information that was not intended for him, he simply will not be able to read it.

15. SQL injections

This is a major roadblock on the way to the database protection. Injections attack the applications and database administrators are forced to clean up the mess of malicious codes and variables that are inserted into the strings. Web application security testing and firewall implementation are the best options to protect the web-facing databases. However this is a big problem for online business, it’s not one of the major mobile security challenges, which is a great advantage for the owners who only have a mobile version of their application.

Stop Data Breaches Using Virgil PureKit Framework

To achieve data privacy, organizations need a data security solution that protects data, prevents data breaches, helps achieve privacy regulations compliance, and provides post-compromised security. This is how Virgil Security’s PureKit works.

To start integrating the Virgil PureKit into your application follow this guide.

Why PureKit

  • A large number of security features that help you to protect data in a database from the threats and causes of data breaches.
  • PureKit can track the number of unsuccessful login attempts of each client, and rate-limit password validation requests (e.g. online attacks), on a per-user basis.
  • Virgil Cloud has no information about users’ passwords and data.
  • There is no need to change existing database infrastructure
  • Secure and flexible key management for any case you can imagine
  • High Key Performance Indicators (KPI), such as high processing speed, unlimited number of records and etc.
  • Price. Start using PureKit now and receive 2 years of service for free!