As many of us know, the world is in an age of data breaches. We've all heard stories of big companies getting hacked and having their data wiped away. But what happens to these companies if they are caught unaware? Well, Optus had one of those incidents, and it caused a massive data breach that caused some serious issues. 

What happened at Optus?

Optus is the second-largest telecommunications provider in Australia. Over 9.8 million customer records were exposed in the Optus data breach on 22nd September. These records included customers' names, physical and email addresses, birth dates, and in some cases, government-issued identification numbers such as driver's licenses and passport numbers. Optus hasn't provided many details up to this point, but there's much to consider.

How to prevent such Data Breaches?

1. Always maintain an updated inventory of your APIs and know what sensitive data is being passed in request and response.
2. Keep a check if an unauthenticated API is exposed to the public and sends sensitive data in response. Use a continuous testing and monitoring tool which sends alerts when this happens.
3. Limit access to your company’s data and allow it on a role-and-needs basis. For example: Even if a supervisor supervises an entire division, he (she) might not require access to all kinds of confidential information. 
4. Use API security tools such as Akto to prevent data breaches. Once you deploy Akto, it will discover all your endpoints, create continuous inventory, and alert if it finds an unauthenticated API exposing sensitive data through continuous testing and monitoring.