Introduction
Data breaches have become a persistent threat for organizations across the globe, with cybercriminals relentlessly targeting valuable data, sensitive customer information, and proprietary business data. The data below is alarming, but the key takeaway is through prevention, monitoring, and rapid remediation, costs can be eliminated or highly mitigated.
The 2023 Cost of a Data Breach Report by Ponemon Institute, published by IBM Security, sheds light on the alarming increase in the average cost of a data breach, reaching an all-time high of USD 4.45 million. This represents a 15.3% increase since 2020, indicating the need for robust security solutions to mitigate potential losses and safeguard critical assets.
In this blog post, we will explore the escalating costs of data breaches and delve into how Approov Mobile Security can eliminate or significantly lower these costs through its comprehensive real-time threat detection capabilities and enhanced mobile App and API security.
Why Mobile?
Simply put, attackers look for the path of least resistance when prodding for easy ways into your castle. The broad distribution, trusted network access, sensitive permissions, weaker API protections, and user trust of mobile apps make them an attractive vector for attackers targeting APIs. Proper API security and safe coding practices are important to thwart these kinds of attacks.
APIs often have weaker authentication and authorization standards compared to websites or other services. Attackers use mobile apps as a vector to exploit these weaker API controls and gain unauthorized access.
The Escalating Costs of Data Breaches
The Ponemon Institute's report reveals that data breach costs have been on a consistent rise, with a 2.3% increase from the previous year. Furthermore, the healthcare industry has reported the most expensive data breaches, experiencing a staggering 53.3% increase in costs since 2020. Additionally, the time to identify and contain breaches remains a critical factor in the financial impact, with breaches lasting more than 200 days incurring a 23% higher cost compared to shorter breach lifecycles.
Reducing Breach Costs with Approov Mobile Security
The best way to reduce the cost of a breach is to prevent them from happening in the first place. However, we all know breaches do happen, so being able to update your security posture over the air to adapt to new threats is key.
Approov Mobile Security provides an all-encompassing runtime security solution for mobile apps and their APIs regardless of the mobile platform they are deployed on. We stop API attacks; provide analytics to better understand ongoing attacks (see Figure 1); and offer flexible security policies to respond to new threats as they emerge.
Figure 1:Early detection of threats can tremendously reduce costs associated with a breach. While Approov will proactively block dangerous devices and apps, by making your security team aware of these threats and trends, real time, they can remediate breaches before more harm can be done. See our live threat metrics dashboard here.
Here are some key features that can remove or significantly reduce the costs associated with data breaches:
Approov ensures that only genuine and authentic mobile apps can access backend services, blocking bots, tampered or repackaged apps, and fake app attacks. This prevents the high costs incurred due to extensive detection and escalation activities.
Device Attestation:
By detecting unsafe operating environments on client devices, such as rooted/jailbroken devices or malicious frameworks, Approov validates all aspects of the client environment and applies dynamic policies for fine-grained control. This significantly reduces the cost of handling compromised devices.
Approov's dynamic pinning service prevents Man-in-the-Middle or Man-in-the-Phone attacks, securing connections to a fixed set of backend certificates. Instant over-the-air pin updates ensure constant protection, reducing the cost of managing potential security breaches by making it easy to rotate compromised certs.
Approov performs continuous, deep inspections of mobile apps and devices, guaranteeing authenticity to backend APIs and services. This prevents API abuse, credential stuffing, fake botnet registrations, and DDoS attacks, which can lead to significant cost savings.
Approov securely manages API keys, certificates, and pins, delivering them just-in-time to the app at runtime. This eliminates the risk of hardcoded or stolen API keys, leading to lower breach costs due to compromised credentials.
Approov seamlessly integrates with existing environments and security tools, ensuring easy deployment for developers. Over-the-air instant pin updates with no service disruptions simplifies management, reducing operational costs.
Conclusion
As data breaches continue to threaten businesses worldwide, the costs associated with such incidents are reaching unprecedented heights. The Ponemon Institute's latest report demonstrates the urgency for robust security measures to protect sensitive data and mitigate potential financial losses.
Approov Mobile Security offers a comprehensive solution that combines real-time threat detection and enhanced mobile app and API security. By leveraging App Attestation, Device Attestation, Channel Integrity, API Protection, Credentials Integrity, and ease of deployment, organizations can significantly reduce the risk of data breaches and associated costs.
By embracing Approov Mobile Security, organizations can fortify their mobile apps and APIs against cyber threats, safeguarding critical data, and ensuring a robust security posture in an ever-evolving threat landscape. Approov eliminates threats through its Runtime Application Self Protection capabilities, and allows enterprises to monitor and react to emerging threats real time. This proactively stops breaches in their tracks and lowers the time to detection/response to imminent threats. With Approov's powerful security features, businesses can confidently defend against data breaches and protect their customers, reputation, and bottom line.
