The Biggest Threat: Data Breaches and Law Enforcement Challenges

This report addresses the significant threat of data breaches to law enforcement. It defines data breaches, their potential impacts on organizations, and discusses relevant data breach laws across different regions. The report highlights tools and measures to combat data breaches, including risk assessment, employee access restrictions, data encryption, strong passwords, antivirus software, and cloud migration. It emphasizes the exponential growth of data breaches since 2005, underscoring their importance as a significant threat. The report includes a real-world example of a data breach caused by a disgruntled employee at an energy company. The report concludes with a list of references to support the information provided.

Running head: THE BIGGEST THREAT
THE BIGGEST THREAT
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

2THE BIGGEST THREAT
Table of Contents
Significant threat........................................................................................................................3
Data Breach law:....................................................................................................................3
Tools to Combat the Problem....................................................................................................3
Why the threat is considered as a Significant Threat.................................................................4
Example......................................................................................................................................5
References..................................................................................................................................6

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Significant threat
The most significant threat that law enforcement faces from the internet is the breach
of data. A data breach can be considered as an event in which the information is mainly
stolen or taken away from the system with the proper knowledge or authorization of the
owners of the system. The effect of such data breach can be on large organisation as well as
small organisation. Putting emphasis on the term data it can include credit card number, trade
secrets, data of the customer or related to matter of national security (Ablon et al., 2016)
The damage which is produced due to factor often can present loss of target and
reputation with regards to company’s prospective due to the concept of betrayal of trust. The
damage may also involve loss of financial aspect of the company as well as that of their
customer. Most of the time the data breaches are mainly attributed to malware or hacking
attacks (Solove & Citron, 2016). This manly comes in hand in hand with the lack of
protection measures from the point of view of the customer who do not involve themselves
into any protective measures to secure the data.
Data Breach law:
Data breach legislation differs in every country and in every region. Many countries
still do not require organisations in order to notify authorities in mere cases of data breach
(Angst et al., 2016). In countries like the Canada, united states and France organisations are
instructed to notify affected individuals of the data breach under condition which are
predefined (Karyda & Mitrou, 2016).
Tools to Combat the Problem
In order to combat the problem of the data breach the following measures can be taken.

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 Conduct of risk assessment: The evaluation factor of which data is of importance and
which can be in mostly sought after by the criminals of the cybercrime. The example of
such data can be credit card number or social security number
 Employee restrict access to sensitive data: Data breaches can be conducted inside jobs.
Taking into account that only the trusted and the necessary people get access to the
sensitive information.
 Use of data encryption and strong password: Installation of encryption software on all the
computer systems, flash drives, mobile devices and back up tapes and on the other hand
making sure that the accounts are protected with strong password.
 Install of antivirus: most of the data breaches occur due to malware download, this mainly
occurs when a user clicks on link which is emailed to them. A strong anti-virus would
automatically detect the link and stop the malicious site before it goes into the system’s
framework.
 Consider moving to cloud: moving to a cloud server can be sometimes very much
beneficial as it alters the risk which is related to the data breach. The cloud can provide a
better security aspect which can be involved in the securing the data of the clients or the
user and on the other hand retrieve the data when required (Joshi & Singh, 2017).
Why the threat is considered as a Significant Threat
The breach of data has played a dominant player in the field of cybercrime since
2005, most of the important data breaches have be recorded to occur on the year 2005 or
beyond. This is due to the factor that the volume of has been growing exponentially over the
past few years. This has resulted in a big concern that the data is kept secured and the cyber
criminals do not get access to the data. In the year 2005 only it was estimated that 136 data
breaches were reported by the privacy right clearing house. More than 4500 data breaches
have been conducted with regard to the public since the indicated time framework. These

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factors can clearly indicate why the concerned that is one of the significant threat which is
playing a very vital role in the overall working of the world of internet
Example
A network engineer at west Virginia energy company EnerVest committed a sabotage
with the data when he was declared to be terminated from the service. The activity that he
performed was that he was involved in resetting all the server which was related to the server
to factory default setting and disconnected remote backups of the system. The result of the
action was that the organisation could not operate for a mere 30days of time which directly
cost them a leakage of around $1 million, the culprit Mitchell faced a criminal prosecution for
the attack. This indecent can be listed in one of the most significant attacks which lead to a
data breach (Greene & Stavins, 2016).

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References
Ablon, L., Heaton, P., Lavery, D., & Romanosky, S. (2016). Data Theft Victims, and Their
Response to Breach Notifications.
Angst, C. M., Block, E. S., D’Arcy, J., & Kelley, K. (2017). When Do IT Security
Investments Matter? Accounting for the Influence of Institutional Factors in the
Context of Healthcare Data Breaches. MIS Quarterly, 41(3).
Greene, C., & Stavins, J. (2016). Did the Target data breach change consumer assessments of
payment card security?.
Joshi, M., & Singh, V. K. (2017). Data Security Breach as Perceived Risk and its Influence
on Consumer Purchase Decision. Asian Journal of Research in Business Economics
and Management, 7(8), 187-196.
Karyda, M., & Mitrou, L. (2016). Data Breach Notification: Issues and Challenges for
Security Management. In MCIS (p. 60).
Solove, D. J., & Citron, D. K. (2016). Risk and Anxiety: A Theory of Data Breach Harms.