Are You Suffering from Breach Fatigue?

Can you clearly recall the last news story that you read about a data breach? If you can’t, you're not alone. You may be suffering from what industry experts have been categorizing as “breach fatigue.” They say we are digesting news stories about data breaches with such veracity that we are slowly becoming desensitized, accepting data loss as an inevitable byproduct of doing business in a Big Data world.

Here’s my take: Prevention trumps reaction every single time, regardless of how fatigued or apathetic we may find ourselves feeling.

FICO has released a new Insights white paper entitled “Best Practices for Preventing Data Breaches” (login required). In this paper, we note that from 2012 through October 2, 2013, there were at least 34,192,454 records exposed through 1,060 breaches. It is certainly a powerful figure that exemplifies the incredible risk that data breaches continue to pose. The cost of doing nothing to mitigate that risk is high. Beyond the direct expense of dealing with the loss of data, organizations invariably suffer other heavy losses after a breach, including from fraud and customer attrition due to reputational damage.

As the title implies, our new Insights paper shares best practices for institutions to proactively protect themselves and their customers against data breaches, as well as to minimize damage when a breach does occur. The very best advice I can give you is to realize the importance of taking preemptive measures to strengthen your core data security practices before your organization becomes another news headline floating in a sea full of breach-weary readers.