Why Breaches Keep Happening — Even at Established Firms

SEMNET TEAM
Oct 15
3 min read

How next-generation Zero-Trust data architectures like Vaultrex are quietly changing the equation

Identity is the new perimeter — and it’s brittle.

Most intrusions still begin with stolen or abused credentials. Once an attacker logs in “as you,” many defensive layers vanish. Verizon’s latest Data Breach Investigations Report again lists credential theft, phishing, and unpatched vulnerabilities as top attack vectors, with ransomware involvement rising and VPN/edge devices often serving as the initial foothold.

When Big Names Get Hit

In early 2024, Cycle & Carriage Singapore disclosed a breach affecting roughly 147 000 customer records, including names, contact details, and partial identity numbers, after unauthorised access into its CRM environment. Investigations showed attackers were able to navigate internal systems once legitimate credentials were compromised.

Similarly, ShopBack — the e-commerce cashback platform — was fined after an incident that exposed data from more than 1.4 million users, stemming from a cloud access key accidentally published online for over a year.

These incidents underscore a hard truth: even established, well-funded companies remain exposed not because they lack encryption, but because their data becomes readable once insiders or attackers enter valid sessions.

Why Conventional Defenses Fall Short

Zero-Trust networks, strong MFA, PAM, XDR, and backup systems all help — but none neutralise what happens after access is granted.

Zero Trust network segmentation limits lateral movement but is difficult to retrofit across legacy systems and SaaS estates.
Strong MFA and IAM blunt phishing but fail when tokens or sessions are hijacked.
PAM and just-in-time privileges constrain administrators yet still decrypt data for those accounts once logged in.
Detection and response platforms correlate telemetry, but analysts drown in noise and “living-off-the-land” activity often evades detection.
Backups and recovery drills shorten downtime but do not reverse a mass data leak.

This pattern explains why breaches such as Cycle & Carriage’s or ShopBack’s continue to recur: attackers no longer need to “break in” when they can simply log in and extract plain data.

The Data-Centric Gap

The underlying weakness is architectural — data is trusted by default once inside the system.Encryption “at rest” and “in transit” provide comfort but not containment.The next evolution of Zero Trust aims to close that gap by encrypting data inside live systems and restricting decryption to the smallest possible slice, for the shortest possible time.

Architectures like Vaultrex’s Zero Trust Data Vault demonstrate this direction.Instead of relying solely on network or identity controls, such systems apply multi-key threshold encryption and immutable audit trails at the data layer.No single administrator, vendor, or attacker can unilaterally decrypt information; every authorised access is logged cryptographically and can be independently verified.

If a breach like those at Cycle & Carriage or ShopBack had occurred under this model, the attackers might still have entered — but what they exfiltrated would have been unreadable ciphertext, devoid of leverage or resale value.

Making Adoption Practical

Enterprises have long hesitated to deploy advanced cryptography due to integration and performance concerns.Modern platforms now address those barriers:

Drop-in APIs overlay existing CRM or ERP databases without full re-architecture.
Managed key-lifecycle services automate rotation and recovery to avoid operational risk.
Low-latency optimisations keep real-time transactions responsive.
Immutable logging simplifies regulatory assurance for PDPC, MAS TRM, and GDPR compliance.

By framing encryption as Zero Trust for data rather than a niche blockchain tool, Vaultrex and similar systems transform cryptographic theory into usable resilience.

From Prevention to Containment

2025’s most successful cybersecurity programmes focus less on keeping intruders out and more on ensuring that breaches don’t yield value.Encrypt comprehensively, audit immutably, and recover rapidly — those are the metrics that now matter.

In that light, Vaultrex acts as the quiet final safeguard: when everything else fails, the data itself refuses to cooperate with the attacker.It bridges two competing needs — airtight protection and operational continuity — without forcing businesses to rebuild from scratch.

The Road Ahead

As attack surfaces expand, third-party dependencies multiply, and AI accelerates both exploitation and defense, one principle stands out: de-value stolen data.Resilience no longer means “unbreachable”; it means breaches without consequence.

Data architectures like Vaultrex’s are nudging the industry in that direction — from access control to impact control, from breach prevention to breach irrelevance.When stolen data has no value, the breach becomes just another incident report — and that may be the most meaningful definition of security in 2025.