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Software Engineering vocabulary · APIs, Networking and Security

Data breach

Meaning in software engineering, with examples

nounCore term

In software engineering, data breach means: A security incident in which personal or confidential data is accessed, stolen, disclosed or lost without authorisation.

In Turkish: veri ihlali, veri sızıntısı

How it is used

A word with legal weight: under laws such as the GDPR and Turkey's KVKK, organisations must notify the regulator, and sometimes the people affected, within set time limits. People say a company 'suffered a data breach' or that data was 'exposed in a breach'.

Example sentences

  1. The data breach exposed the names and email addresses of 40,000 customers.

  2. Legal wants to know whether this counts as a reportable data breach.

Common collocations

  • suffer a data breach
  • report a data breach
  • breach notification
  • personal data breach
  • large-scale breach
  • incidentAn unplanned event that disrupts a service or makes it worse for users, such as an outage, a big slowdown or a data problem, and that needs a quick response.
  • GDPRGeneral Data Protection Regulation: the European Union law, applied since May 2018, that sets rules for how organisations collect, use and protect personal data.
  • complianceThe state of following the laws, regulations, standards and internal policies that apply to an organisation, and being able to prove it.
  • digital forensicsThe collection and analysis of digital evidence, such as disk images, memory and logs, to find out what happened during an incident in a way that can stand up in court.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: APIs, Networking and Security

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