Watch Out! Malware is Polluting Your Data Lake

Every merger and acquisition results in large volumes of data being transferred across companies; and every business service in your company generates and exchanges data from third-party partners and supply chain providers. In fact, every time you send an email or text, you are producing data.  All this data is collected and stored in data lakes, large systems of files and unstructured data that are susceptible to malware pollution. As digital transformations have significantly increased cloud data storage over the past couple of years and enterprise data lakes have expanded, there is greater potential for costly cyber risks.

When unknown malware enters a data lake, bad actors can gain access to the data, manipulate it, mine it, and sell it on the dark web. They also create new malware strains, with over 450,000 new malware programs being registered daily. Although security teams can clean up the “pollution” after it has occurred, the best way to remove pollution from a data lake is to avoid it in the first place and ensure that proactive security safeguards are put in place. Building out a strategy and implementing technologies that can protect the data lake as a whole is a great place to start.