Mumbai, Feb 14 (IANS): Data breaches are becoming more pervasive and damaging and are now affecting every department within an organisation -- leaving a lingering, if not lasting, imprint on an enterprise, a new report said on Tuesday.

The report by the US wireless communications service provider Verizon found that humans were still at fault in data breaches and cybersecurity incidents, fulfilling the roles of threat actors, targeted victims and incident response stakeholders.

"In working with victim organisations, we find that breaches touch every part of an organization up to and including its board of directors," Bryan Sartin, Executive Director, the RISK Team at Verizon Enterprise Solutions, said in a statement. 

"Companies need to be prepared to handle data breaches before they actually happen in order to recover as quickly as possible. Otherwise, breaches can lead to enterprise-wide damage that can have devastating and long-lasting consequences," Sartin added. 

The "Data Breach Digest" by Verizon is designed to help businesses and government understand how to identify signs of a data breach, important sources of evidence and ways to quickly investigate, contain and recover from a breach.

The report also found that there is a finite set of scenarios that occur with data breaches but many permutations occur within each, leading to an expansive range of damage that can be observed in the aftermath of a data breach.