Led by Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, vpnMentor’s research team of ethical hackers, recently discovered a data leak by the popular app Key Ring, that compromised the privacy and security of their 14 million users.

New research from Infrascale indicates that 58 percent of C-level executives at small and medium businesses (SMBs) said their biggest data storage challenge is security vulnerability.

Looking back at cybercrime incidents of the past 10 years, only the questions of "if" and "when" remain. "If" a business has no active cybersecurity policy and processes even just hundreds of rich customer records, "when" becomes soon enough. For the past 10 years, at least eight large-scale data breaches per year have trembled economies. You’d imagine that as business owners, we would have learned the immense value of the digital data we hold. The Ponemon Institute says that just in the US, the average size of a data breach is 25,575 records with a cost of $150 per record on average. That could be the money you would have paid in damages, as a government fine, and potentially in customer lawsuits.

Often, the significance of backing up your company’s data is diminished by the hundreds of other things you must do as a small business owner to simply keep the company running day-to-day. Unfortunately, what most small business owners fail to realize is that the lack of an adequate data backup can cause the doors of a business to close more often than you’d think. For this reason, it is crucial that every company has at least one efficient and effective method of data backup in place.

vpnMentor’s research team recently discovered a breached database, containing more than 135 million records. The database, claims vpnMentor, belongs to Cloud backup provider SOS Online Backup. 

Cybersecurity breaches are a major threat to every business and can quickly lead to network downtime. In fact, a standard breach costs an average of $3.5 million (IBM). However, if a large organization is unprepared, this cost could skyrocket, as was the case for one firm last year, which lost an estimated $51 million after halting operations due to a breach.

Is it truly possible to train every single employee—including those working from home and organizations’ third-party partners—to spot a cyber-threat? Or to keep good cybersecurity hygiene when handling sensitive data? Or to refrain from stealing intellectual property when they’re disgruntled and about to resign? While training is a key element to preventing breaches and protecting important corporate data, training alone is not enough.

A new ransomware called Nefilim that shares much of the same code as Nemty has started to become active and threatens to release stolen data.

Led by cybersecurity analysts Noam Rotem and Ran Locar, vpnMentor’s research team recently found a serious breach in an open Amazon S3 bucket owned by secure cloud storage provider Data Deposit Box.