Security News > 2021 > November > If cybercriminals can’t see data because it’s encrypted, they have nothing to steal

Here's the irony of ransomware data breach stories that gets surprisingly little attention: cybercriminals enthusiastically encrypt and steal sensitive data to extort money and yet their victims rarely bother to defend themselves using the same obviously highly effective concept.

If sensitive data such as IP are competently encrypted, that not only means that attackers can't access or threaten to leak it, in many cases they won't even be able to see it in the first place - all encrypted data looks alike.

What you're left with is a form of data paralysis where organisations default back to trying to stop access to sensitive data rather than protecting the data itself.

"We enable them to discover the data in both structured and unstructured format and scan those locations and find out what data is there. For instance, perhaps they want to understand what GDPR data they have, or to adhere to PCI-DSS or HIPAA," says Hamplova.

The ongoing chaos surrounding data and what to do with it was confirmed by Thales's 2021 Thales Data Threat Report, which found that three quarters of the 2,600 global IT respondents questioned weren't certain where all their organisation's data was located.

Interestingly on the data protection side, despite 42 per cent saying they'd experienced a data breach within the previous 12 months, half of victims were still able to avoid making a notification to information commissioners because the stolen data had been encrypted.

News URL

https://go.theregister.com/feed/www.theregister.com/2021/11/16/encrypted_data_ransomware_defence/