Multiple high-profile companies across a variety of sectors—including Carnival, Wegmans, McDonald’s, Volkswagen, and CVS—have confirmed in recent days they were either victims of a data breach or were alerted to a gap in their security controls. Many of these incidents could have been easily prevented and paint a picture of how vulnerable companies still are to any cyber-attack, never mind the sophisticated ones.

Jaclyn Jaeger is a freelance contributor to Compliance Week after working for the company for 15 years. She writes on a wide variety of topics, including ethics and compliance, risk management, legal,...