Massive enterprise data breaches have grown commonplace during the last few years. The data breaches listed in Table 1 illustrate how serious a single data breach may be, with the potential to expose the personal information of hundreds of millions of people and result in a $100 million dollar financial loss. The following describes notable recent data breaches that were caused, respectively, by insiders and external cyberattacks. We pay close attention to the Target databreach17, which is an example of a data leak incident brought on by external attackers.

Although big data offers businesses great opportunities, the constantly expanding data volumes within corporate systems eventually lead to a data leak risk. Data breaches will grow more costly to businesses for the same reason. Sensitive information is frequently shared across different stakeholders, such as clients and business partners. Today’s businesses increasingly use cloud file sharing and external collaboration with other companies, which exacerbates the problem of data leaking. However, as the workforce becomes more mobile, people working from locations outside of the organization’s walls increase the risk of data leaks. Furthermore, in big data environments, the motivations for cyberattacks aimed at acquiring private company data have drastically expanded because to larger payoffs and greater visibility from a single attack. The detection of unlawful use, access, and disclosure of sensitive company data is made more difficult by these fac-tors. Here, we describe a number of technical obstacles to data leak detection in the big data era.