Orbitz: Why You Can't Secure Data in the Dark

By Jacob Serpa, Product Marketing Manager, Bitglass

On March 1, 2018, Orbitz discovered that a malicious party may have stolen information from one of its legacy platforms. The compromised platform housed Orbitz customer information such as mailing addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, and full names, as well as details about nearly 900,000 payment cards.

This data breach highlights the struggle that many companies face on a day-to-day basis.

Stated simply, organizations cannot afford to secure their data in the dark. Lacking comprehensive visibility makes it nearly impossible to protect sensitive information – you cannot defend against threats that you can't see. Where enterprises fail to maintain automatic, thorough logging of all events involving corporate data, breaches are sure to follow.

The fact that Orbitz was unable to confirm whether a hacker had stolen information is evidence that it lacked adequate visibility. If the company had tools that provided said visibility, then identifying a data breach would have been fairly simple. Additionally, with real-time capabilities, the company could have identified the potential breach the moment that it occurred (somewhere between October and December of 2017), rather than months after the fact.

The speed at which hackers, malware, and malicious insiders can exfiltrate data demands real-time security and comprehensive visibility. Incomplete, reactive security tools are incapable of providing protection in today's rapid, cloud-first world. Only a cloud access security brokers (CASB) can provide what the modern enterprise needs.