In light of yesterday’s news, the reporting of the Twitter hack comes as another reminder that there is no silver bullet for cyber security.
Hanah Darley, Head of Threat Research from Darktrace, said, “We have to understand that all platforms are vulnerable. It is time to shift our focus to proactively addressing cyber risk which means identifying the vulnerabilities that can be exploited by attackers to get to an organisation’s crown jewels.
“Darktrace understands that encryption is an important part of cyber hygiene, but it will not stop data breaches especially if the data is stored elsewhere, either encrypted or decrypted.
“Data leaks are a risk every company faces. For social media giants, their customer data risk is much higher than most other organisations given the high interest persons who are users, and the potential to disclose private conversations.
“The Darktrace team believes that a concerning element of this data leak is the possibility for personally identifiable information to be combined and cross-verified with data stolen in other leaks, such as the recent WhatsApp leak. This creates real pathways for abuse and spam, especially against high-profile individuals. This will increasingly become a problem as more leaks occur and more personal data becomes available online.
“Once data has been stolen the cat is out of the bag and so the urgent problem to be tackled by all organizations is preventing data breaches from occurring in the first place. The most cyber mature organizations today are using artificial intelligence to augment human teams to continuously understand their unique risk profile and harden their defences.”
