The company would have to spend money on responding to and recovering from the breach, and its reputation would fall among its stakeholders and customers. Classified information is data that has been intentionally kept secret at a governmental level.
It typically belongs to a certain tier of sensitivity restricted, confidential, secret, or top secret that limits the people who have access to the information. For the organization, the consequences of a data breach of sensitive information can range from minor to disastrous.
In particularly devastating cases, such as the Home Depot breach , companies may be required to pay tens of millions of dollars in damage compensation to customers and financial institutions. If PII is accessed by cyberattackers, the information can be used for a number of nefarious purposes. According to a Ponemon Institute study of organizations worldwide, the likelihood that an organization in the study will experience a data breach in the next two years is more than one in four.
Fortunately, there are regulations in place to protect the sensitive information of individuals and businesses. The following are a few of the most important ones:. However, issues such as large-scale cloud infrastructures, the diversity and volume of data sources and formats, and the streaming nature of data acquisition further complicate data protection. The notification requirement of these laws can often create negative publicity, resulting in loss of general goodwill and, in more severe cases, class action lawsuits.
In addition to notification obligations, breach notification laws often impose additional duties, which vary depending on the storage media. Legislative findings in several states emphasize the importance of preserving trust and confidentiality, while others emphasize the need to protect consumers from identity theft.
Each regulation has varying levels of compliance requirements. These regulations can be used as classification levels within your schema. For example, if you classify files as PCI DSS and find files classified as such outside of your Cardholder Data Environment CDE , you can immediately move or destroy that data and then investigate how that data leaked from the CDE and implement a process to prevent it from recurring. At first glance, many cases of unregulated data may not appear to be sensitive.
However, upon closer attention and additional context, that seemingly unimportant piece of data could actually contain sensitive information and be classified as sensitive, protected data. For example, take the scenario of an ordinary shopping list. Most of the time, shopping lists contain seemingly harmless information. We can take that scenario and increase the scale to that of a large organization. Perhaps an organization sends out a customer survey that asks what beauty products or brands customers have used within the past six months.
While at first the information may seem harmless, there is likely sensitive information within those survey responses that should be kept private. To most, it looks like a bunch of noise. That attack could lead to the theft of personal consumer information, including names, addresses and phone numbers — leading to potentially severe legal consequences or even a class action lawsuit.
Organizations today are constantly creating and storing new types of data. For that reason, CCTV footage of you is personal data, as are fingerprints. Organisations typically collect and store multiple pieces of information on data subjects, and the amassed information can be considered personal data if it can be pieced together to identify a likely data subject.
Think of it like a massive game of Guess Who? However, where the name is combined with other information such as an address, a place of work, or a telephone number this will usually be sufficient to clearly identify one individual. Many of us do not know the names of all our neighbours, but we are still able to identify them. This includes information pertaining to:. Sensitive personal data should be held separately from other personal data, preferably in a locked drawer or filing cabinet.
A common misconception about the GDPR is that all organisations need to seek consent to process personal data. In fact, consent is only one of six lawful grounds for processing personal data , and the strict rules regarding lawful consent requests make it the least preferable option.
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