7 Data Integrity Threats to Be Aware Of

What is Data Integrity ?

Data integrity refers to the reliability and trustworthiness of data throughout its lifetime. It may describe the condition of your info; for example, whether it’s valid or invalid or the process of ensuring its validity and accuracy. For example, error checking and validation are common strategies for safeguarding data integrity. However, there are many potential threats to data integrity, such as human error, software bugs, and malicious attacks.

What is the Difference Between Data Integrity and Data Security?

Data security and integrity are two different but important concepts. Data integrity refers to the trustworthiness of data, whereas data security refers to the protection of data. Data security aims to minimize the risk of leaking confidential business documents, healthcare data, email messages, trade secrets, and other intellectual property. Permissions management, data categorization, identity and access management, threat detection, and data security analytics are just a few of the data security tactics used to maintain data confidentiality.

Every single day, businesses are making decisions based on data. They assume that their data can be trusted, that it’s complete, and that they’re therefore making the best possible data-driven strategic choices for their continued growth and success. These decisions have significant impacts on their bottom-lines. But what happens when your data is incomplete? Perhaps more importantly, what happens when it’s either entirely or partially incorrect?

The importance of data integrity has become a widely discussed concern for businesses around the world. With regulations like GDPR and the POPI Act emerging in the EU and South Africa, protection of personal information within your data has become essential, but this is not the only threat that businesses face when it comes to protecting their data.

In the past, the major threats facing businesses when it came to cybercriminals were Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS, attacks. This didn’t affect data integrity, so businesses automatically assumed that their data was safe and secure, and didn’t need additional protection. But cyberthreats are constantly evolving, and perpetrators quickly found that modifying or destroying a business’ data would have serious implications. This has seen a rise in data attacks, where cybercriminals gain unauthorised access to a company’s data and hold it to ransom.

There are a number of ways that cybercriminals can gain access to your data and threaten its integrity. Let’s look at some of the major threats, as well as some actionable tips and best practices on protecting your business information.

Data Integrity Threats

1. Poor Passwords

An organisation can prevent threats to data integrity by implementing a system that encourages users to set secure passwords. These will often contain a combination of numbers, letters and special characters.

Because the securest passwords are often difficult to remember, you should also consider using password managers. These allow the exchange of user login credentials without necessarily disclosing the password itself, and make it easy to keep track of unique passwords for a number of sites and apps. This way your staff will have secure access to information, and you’ll be able to accommodate employees who need to share credentials as part of their job.

On top of having a strict password policy, multi-factor authentication is essential for enterprise security nowadays. It means that even if a password becomes compromised, cybercriminals will still not be able to access your business data without credentials for a separate email address, or access to a separate device.

2. Outdated Software and Apps

Having outdated software is one of the most significant threats to data integrity. It puts your business at serious risk of a ransomware attack.

Take, for example, the WannaCry ransomware attack of 2017, which affected over 160,000 users worldwide. More than 67% of the devices targeted by the WannaCry ransomware were devices whose owners had postponed installing Windows security updates. Even though Windows released an improved layer of data security after discovering hackers had gained access to users’ data, many businesses continued to use outdated apps, and were exposed to attackers.

3. Network Vulnerabilities

Network vulnerabilities are weaknesses or defects in hardware or other business resources that attackers could use to gain access to your company’s data. Whenever there is a possibility that a cybercriminal could breach your network security, it automatically becomes a threat to data integrity.

But it’s not only undiagnosed weaknesses that could see cybercriminals gaining unauthorised access to your network. Your user credentials also add to network vulnerability. The more credentials there are, the greater the risk that an attacker could gain access to your data. This makes it essential to limit the number of staff members who have access to your data.

Whenever an employee leaves your company, it is imperative that you update their login information, disable their interactions, and remove their access to various company systems. This reduces the risk of their outdated credentials being used to access your systems.

4. Software Vulnerabilities

While network vulnerabilities are usually hardware based, software vulnerabilities are often found in your code, or in the apps that your business uses. Keeping your software up-to-date and regularly checking your code for errors and deficiencies are essential parts of keeping your business protected.

Attackers are constantly looking for loopholes that they can take advantage of. As soon as one is found, hackers will often create viruses and programs that will provide them with access to devices and networks and help take control of them. If you think of your networks as being housed in a physical building, these exploits are the crowbars and lock picks that attackers might use to break in.

While regular testing and manual code inspections are best practices that most businesses follow, they are often ineffective when it comes to software vulnerability. It’s practically impossible to detect all possible vulnerabilities manually, after all. This is why it’s critical to have a thorough understanding of the vulnerabilities that have been discovered, and to update your software as soon as new versions and patches become available. This will help you to handle security threats quickly and efficiently.

5. Intrusion Attacks

There are two different types of intrusions that most businesses need to be prepared for: data intrusions and network intrusions.

A data intrusion is when someone gains unauthorised access to your data. This could come from malware being installed on a device, it could be an employee intentionally accessing data that they shouldn’t be able to, or it could be someone on your network unintentionally breaching your data access. Any of these would be considered an intrusion. While the most dangerous intruders are those who threaten your data protection, even someone who accesses a file by mistake could make changes that threaten your data integrity.

A network intrusion often involves an intruder using your network’s resources illicitly. This could be using them in a way that they weren’t intended for, or stealing sensitive network services. Either case poses a threat to your network and data protection.

Your business and your IT teams need to understand how intrusions work, and what can cause them, to identify and react to them proactively. Having intrusion detection and prevention systems in place will help you to avoid both data and network intrusions, or put a quick stop to them when they do occur.

6. Poor Configuration Management

Configuration management involves maintaining both hardware and software systems, and ensuring that they perform optimally. Part of this maintenance is running regular checks and updates to systems, but it also includes configuring operating systems, devices, networks and assets, and making sure that they’re secure. When it’s done poorly, it can pose a serious threat to your data integrity.

While configuration management can sometimes be a manual process, there are technologies available to help you streamline your systems using IT automation. These will ensure that your systems are constantly up to date and running efficiently, and that they aren’t vulnerable to attack. It will also help you to keep track of configuration changes across your systems, preventing device outages, security breaches, and information leakage.

7. Improper Security Architecture

Every process that your business implements to keep your infrastructure and data safe from unauthorised access and manipulation should form part of your security architecture. When you don’t have proper security architecture in place, you put your critical systems such as privacy, integrity and accessibility at risk.

You can think of your security architecture as a guideline for your IT team. It advises them on how to conduct security checks, and details the standards, protocols, and operational procedures that they should avoid, examine, and use to identify threats. It’s the cornerstone of your company’s protection against cyber-attacks, ensuring that all aspects of your IT network are safe.

What Types of Data Integrity Are There?

Knowing that you need to maintain your business’ data integrity and putting measures in place to do so are two different matters. As you can imagine, given the example above, keeping your data secure and accurate, while at the same time ensuring that it is accessible by multiple parties, is a complicated process, especially when there are several types of data integrity that you need to consider.

1. Physical Integrity

Where and how your data is stored is essential to maintaining its integrity. If, for example, all of your data is stored on-site in South Africa, every time load shedding hits, it is placed at risk, as it could easily become corrupted. Thankfully this threat to physical integrity can be reduced by ensuring that your business has generators or inverter systems in place so that integral systems never go down, even in the case of a power outage.

But this isn’t the only threat out there – data is prone to human error, as well as at threat from cyberattacks. Keeping your data backed up and stored in the cloud, with a disaster recovery plan in place should something go wrong, will see you vastly reducing the risk to your data’s physical integrity.

2. Logical Integrity

Where physical integrity is all about the way that data is stored, logical integrity is all about the way that it’s accessed, used, and maintained. There are a number of different considerations to keep in mind when thinking about your data’s logical integrity:

• Entity Integrity: You need to make sure that your data is uniquely identifiable. In the example of Joe Smith listed above, you would want to give the client a unique identifier such as a Client ID or reference. This will ensure that if another Joe Smith approaches your company, you’ll be able to keep the information for the two clients separate and easily identifiable. It will also prevent you from having three sets of information listed for the same client.
• Referential Integrity: While there are certain pieces of information that need to be unique, such as client identifiers, there are also pieces of information that you would expect to be shared by a number of different clients. For example, if you have a list of products or services that you offer, you would want to make sure that your data reflects items in this list correctly. You wouldn’t want your Sales team to refer to a product one way, and your Accounts team to bill it in another way, for example.
• Domain Integrity: When dealing with numbers and figures, dates and times, it’s important that data is stored in the same way, no matter who is putting it in. This is where domain integrity comes in – it ensures that information is stored in the correct way for your business. This makes it far easier to maintain accurate data, and to analyse it. For example, as a South African business, you may want your currency fields to appear as Rands and cents. If someone enters a Rand amount (without cents), domain integrity will ensure that the data is corrected to include “.00” cents. If someone tries to write out the amount, or includes a letter rather than a number in error (typing R before the amount, for example), domain integrity will stop the data from being stored until it’s entered correctly.

• User-Defined Integrity: Because no two businesses are the same, it’s likely that there are going to be rules about the way that you store data that the standard integrity checks don’t meet. You may want your unique IDs to follow a specific pattern, for example, including specific letters before the identifying number. You might want to set a minimum fee, or a limit on how many items a client can purchase from you. These kinds of individualised rules that you set for your data are known as user-defined integrity, and are essential for storing data in a way that suits your business needs.

Ways to Ensure Data Integrity

As many data transactions are automated and computerised, businesses have a great responsibility to ensure there is no data loss, theft, or any compromises throughout the data lifecycle. How can companies ensure data integrity? By being proactive and implementing certain controls.

9 Ways to Maintain Data Integrity

1. Apply Quality Assurance Measures: Have a dedicated team of experts constantly check your quality control protocols and procedures. Performing regular checks will verify that every employee who uses the data complies with the relevant data governance policies and maintains confidentiality.
2. Have Strong Access Management: A robust access management system ensures data integrity. Giving access to appropriate users who can view or make changes to the data, increases a company’s data visibility and integrity. In the event of a data breach, it is crucial to identifying the source of the problem. That is why access management is essential for maintaining data integrity.
3. Implement Error Detection Software: Manually auditing your systems, validating your procedures and managing access to your data can be a time-consuming process. And it’s not even the most efficient solution. In fact, it can be prone to error, and anomalies can get over-looked, compromising your data integrity. The right automated error detection software can verify all important documents and data to ensure accuracy, relevance, and quality.
4. Encrypting your Data: Encryption is one of the best practices for data security. It can ensure that your data remains secure, even in the case of unauthorised access, since without an encryption key attackers will find it difficult to infiltrate or manipulate information. This way, even if there is a data breach, cybercriminals will not be able to access any sensitive data.
5. Implement Multi-Factor Authentication: Gone are the days when simple passwords would suffice. In this digital era, as cybercriminals and cyberattacks become more and more precise, destructive and dangerous, you need more than a strong password. You need to implement Multi-Factor Authentication. This will ensure that even when a cybercriminal does gain access to one set of login credentials, without access to that user’s email address, cellphone or fingerprints, they will still not be able to access your business’ information.
6. Educate Employees: While many companies always focus on what they think of as bigger and more important projects, like finding the right software provider, performing regular data audits, meeting compliance requirements and so on, they do not focus on smaller, yet powerful, strategies to maintain data integrity. One area that can have a huge impact is educating employees. Businesses need their employees to advocate data integrity, understanding its importance and ensuring that it is a top priority. Training can help them to quickly and effectively highlight all activities that might compromise data integrity, and avoid falling victim to them.
7. Backing Up Data: Even small businesses that do not deal with sensitive data should have a backup and restore option for their website, documents and information. When you deal with sensitive data, always make sure you have a strong backup and restoration plan in place. In the event of data loss, breach, or system failure, data can be restored seamlessly if you have a backup, ensuring that your operations can continue uninterrupted, and that your data cannot be manipulated irreparably or held at ransom.
8. Select Appropriate Systems and Service Providers: Always choose the right technology service provider and systems that comply with the prevailing data regulations to help you meet your business data integrity needs. Ensure that you know which software your service provider is using and get a certificate of proof for the same. Go the extra mile and understand your provider’s work culture, previous work, and read through their testimonials.

Conclusion

When you have systems in place for monitoring and managing your data’s integrity, you’re well placed to quickly respond to any threat that may arise, whether it’s an incident, an abnormality, or a network misconfiguration. You’ll even be in a great position for embracing remote working. But, most importantly of all, you’ll be able to trust that the data you’re using to make your operational decisions is complete, correct, and secure. This will help you to confidently make the data-driven decisions that your company needs to grow.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)