Here is a quiet one that turns up in nearly every estate we look at. A test or development database, sitting on a less-protected server, with a full, real copy of your production data in it. Real customer records. Real financials. Same data as production, none of the protection.
It happens for the most reasonable reason in the world. Someone needed realistic data to test against, so they took a copy of production, because that is the realistic data. The test worked. The copy stayed. And now your most sensitive information lives in a second place that nobody is watching, often with weaker access, no encryption, and a backup nobody checks, because it is only test.
To an attacker, or to a breach notification, there is no such thing as only test. Data is data. A copy of your customers’ records on a forgotten dev box is exactly as reportable as the same records in production, and usually far easier to walk off with.
If your production data is locked down, encrypted, and monitored, but a full copy of it is sitting on a test server that none of that applies to, how much is the lockdown on production actually worth? You have protected the front door and left a copy of everything by the back one.
We run a free, read-only check that finds where your real data actually lives, not just where it is supposed to. Often the surprise is not how production is protected. It is how many copies of production there are that nobody remembered making.
Want to know if this is sitting in your estate? We run a read-only check and hand you a graded report in plain English.
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