What Is Data Breaches and How OpenProdkt Helps Prevent Them

It’s essential. Organizations face increasing threats from cyberattacks that exploit system vulnerabilities, leading to what is known as data breaches. These breaches result in unauthorized access to sensitive information, causing significant financial, operational, and reputational harm. Understanding what is data breaches is the first step toward building a robust security posture.

That’s where OpenProdkt comes in. Designed with a security-first mindset, OpenProdkt equips businesses with the tools to proactively identify risks, enforce policy-driven access controls, and ensure resilient infrastructure. This article explores what data breaches are, their impact, and how OpenProdkt offers end-to-end protection to help prevent them—before damage is done.

Why Do We Care?

 

When asking what is data breaches, the answer begins with understanding how attackers exploit weak spots in systems. A data breach exposes sensitive information to unauthorized access, threatening your application’s integrity. OpenProdkt addresses this risk by embedding security deeply into your development and infrastructure workflows.

OpenProdkt is built with a platform-first mindset. Its integrated observability, policy-driven access controls, and disaster recovery planning directly tackle the very nature of what is data breaches.

What Is Data Breaches?

 

A data breach is when sensitive data is viewed, stolen, or modified by an unauthorized individual. It starts with data that matters—your customers’ personal, financial, or operational records. OpenProdkt mitigates these risks by ensuring only authorized users can interact with data through multi-region backup, strict access rules, and continuous monitoring.

Business Impact of Data Breaches

 

• Data ​Loss​If we lose data that we need due to someone accessing it, that can have a huge impact. Especially when the data we are collecting is important and confidential. We should not keep data if we do not have a reason to do so because that will cause more damage than help us.
• Breach ​Cleanup Costs​The cleanup cost after a breach is high. If attacked, we must ensure that unauthorized users have not left anything malicious behind. We must ensure they did not leave any back doors or cause any other damage.
• Revenue ​Impact​​A data breach has a massive reputational and financial impact. The fact is, it will cost us to deal with the vulnerability itself. It will cost us financially and cost our relationship with our customers.

Reputational ​Damage​​Reputational damage will have a revenue impact and affect new customers coming on board. We could lose our current customers because we lost their data. It takes a long time, months, for an organization to land a customer, and it only takes a single breach to lose that customer. We need to focus on preventing this.

Common “Story” of a Data Breach

 

1. The attacker will research the target. The attacker goes out, starts researching, and will find a way to get into our organization through technical or human means like social engineering. Many things can motivate that research: personal reasons, financial gain, or activism. The reason does not matter from the organizational standpoint; the fact is, somebody out there will want to attack our organization.
2. The attacker executes the attack. Multiple different types of attacks might be launched. The attack could be a social engineering attack, where they can get on-site and plug a thumb drive into the wrong computer. Their attack could also be when they send a phishing email, somebody opens the wrong link, and they are given access to our internal network.
3. The attacker accesses the system. The attacker has launched the attack, and they are going to start exfiltrating that data. They will then either delete it or try to steal it. An attacker will usually steal the data because that data has value. That is why we store the data: it has value for us. It can also add value to the attacker, and they will sell it to the highest bidder to make a profit.

The Average Cost of a Data Breach

 

1. Average total ​cost of a breach​: 4.45M USD. For most organizations, that is a large amount of money to lose; we would be in much trouble if we lost $4.4 or $5 million on average.
2. Most expensive in the US: 10.93M​ USD. That is a massive amount of money for something that would pay dividends if we had taken a fraction of that and invested in prevention. That is why it is so important for us to build security by understanding that once someone makes a breach, there is a misconception about how long someone stays in our system.
3. Average time ​to identify​: 277 Days. Many people believe that once attackers are in, they might be in for a week or two before we catch them stealing our data. This is not true for the majority of breaches. After a successful breach, attackers are, on average, in the system for 277 days. It is important to understand that once a breach has occurred, especially from a sophisticated attacker, they can be there a long time and will put things in place to ensure their access remains when they leave. The longer they have access, the more money they will be able to make or the more they will be able to do damage over a longer period.

Learning, Not Shaming

We will go through a few case studies in the next few slides. They will call out specific incidents that happened to organizations. The following examples are not meant ​to shame the data breach victims ​but instead are a way for the industry ​to learn from previous breaches.​ The fact is that approximately 2000 data breaches happen yearly. For most organizations, it is not about an if but when.

These examples are here to show us how we can work to prevent or react to breaches. It is about the lessons learned from the people who came before us to ensure we learn from the past, not shaming the people who have had these incidents happen.

Case Study: Equifax

1. February 2017: Apache was notified of a vulnerability in its struts platform.
2. March 2017: Apache provided the release of the patch.
3. May 2017: Unbeknownst to Equifax, a breach occurred.
4. July 30, 2017: Equifax detected and patched the vulnerability.
5. September 7, 2017: Equifax announces the breach.
6. Late September 2017: The CSO and the CIO retired, and the CEO stepped down.

The scope of this breach was 143 million Americans.

What Went Wrong

 

Modified This vulnerability has been modified since it was last analyzed by the NVD. It is awaiting reanalysis which may result in further changes to the information provided.

Current Description The Jakarta Multipart parser in Apache Struts 2 2.3.x before 2.3.32 and 2.5.x before 2.5.10.1 has incorrect exception handling and error-message generation during file-upload attempts, which allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands via a crafted Content-Type, Content-Disposition, or Content-Length HTTP header, as exploited in the wild in March 2017 with a Content-Type header containing a #cmd= string.

1. Lack of Patching. There was a good chunk of time between when the vulnerability was announced to the world and when Equifax patched it. Lack of patching was a big part of this problem.
2. Lateral Movement. Another problem was that the attacker moved laterally through the Equifax organization as they were looking for data to steal.
3. Exfiltration. The attacker could exfiltrate the data out of Equifax to a server on the internet.
4. Lack of Disclosure. Equifax waited too long to disclose the issue; too much time had passed while they were working on the problem internally. They should have owned the problem when they were first notified. Within a day or two, they should have gone to the public and announced the breach and the measures they were taking to fix it. Instead, due to this lack of disclosure, their initially projected impact of 10 million people increased every couple of days. The impact increased by 10, then 20, up to 143 million people until almost every American adult was impacted by this breach.

How OpenProdkt Helps Prevent Data Breaches

 

To understand how OpenProdkt prevents data breaches, we first need to address the core of the question: what is data breaches? A data breach occurs when unauthorized individuals gain access to confidential data—such as customer information, financial records, or internal communications—through exploiting vulnerabilities in systems, networks, or human error. These breaches don’t just result in data theft; they disrupt operations, erode customer trust, and cause financial losses that can reach millions of dollars.

OpenProdkt is designed to stop these breaches before they happen. With a security-first approach built into every layer of the platform, OpenProdkt transforms the way businesses approach threat prevention, detection, and response.

Threat Modeling and Penetration Testing

OpenProdkt starts with threat modeling, helping teams map out possible attack vectors before they can be exploited. By understanding where their systems are most vulnerable, organizations can proactively fix weaknesses. Alongside this, penetration testing simulates real-world attacks to test the strength of existing defenses. These continuous assessments form the backbone of OpenProdkt’s preventative approach and are critical to understanding what is data breaches and how to stop them.

Infrastructure-Level Observability

Most breaches go undetected for months. According to industry data, attackers often linger within compromised systems for over 270 days. OpenProdkt counters this with infrastructure-level observability, offering real-time visibility across all systems. By monitoring for abnormal behavior, unauthorized access attempts, or unusual traffic patterns, it enables early threat detection—giving your team the chance to respond before any damage is done.

Policy-Driven Access Control

One of the most common answers to the question what is data breaches lies in poor access management. OpenProdkt tackles this through policy-driven access controls, ensuring users only access the data and systems necessary for their roles. Every action is authenticated, logged, and reviewed. This limits the potential damage of compromised credentials or insider threats and adds an additional layer of accountability across your environment.

Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity

Even with strong preventive measures, no system is completely immune. That’s why OpenProdkt includes disaster recovery and business continuity features as standard. Multi-region backups, automated failover mechanisms, and rapid recovery tools ensure that if a breach or system failure occurs, downtime is minimal and critical data is preserved. It’s a safety net that reinforces your security framework.

 

Multi-Region Backup and Failover Strategy

Data redundancy is essential in breach prevention. OpenProdkt’s multi-region backup and failover strategy means your data isn’t stored in just one place. If one environment is compromised, operations seamlessly shift to another secure location. This significantly reduces the risk of data loss and ensures continued service availability.

Lessons Learned

 

So, what is data breaches in the context of OpenProdkt? It’s a preventable threat—one that can be anticipated, detected, and mitigated with the right tools in place. OpenProdkt doesn’t just react to attacks; it builds a resilient environment that defends against them from every angle. From proactive threat modeling to intelligent recovery systems, OpenProdkt empowers businesses to stay one step ahead of evolving security threats and protect what matters most.

1. Inherent risk is inherited through the acquisition process. ​When we acquire a company and bring it into our fold, we acquire all the vulnerabilities that come with that. It is a basic principle when dealing with third-party systems. We write software, add a third-party library, and own their vulnerabilities.
2. IT and Database experts play a role in detecting data breaches. ​They are the ones who are there watching the frontline actions that are happening. How is the data being managed? What is happening to our data? What is happening to our IT systems? They are a great source for letting us know something is going on.
3. Nation states pursue data breaches as a mechanism to profile and attack citizens of other nations. ​ ​When we think of nation-states, we often think it is the government attacking governments and states attacking states. However, the reality is that organizations are also targets.

Key Takeaways

1. Those who cannot remember the security past are condemned to repeat it.
2. The front page of the newspaper or a web site is a terrible place to see your organization featured as a result of a data breach.
3. Data breach results in data loss, costs for breach cleanup, revenue impact, and reputational damage.