What Should Companies Do After a Data Breach?

The most feared event in cyberspace, data breaches are events that result in the leak of confidential, protected, or sensitive information to unauthorized bodies. This includes the loss or theft of information such as bank account details, credit card numbers, personal health data, and any login credentials.

This can be an accidental event, but most often it is an intentional attempt to steal information from an individual or organization.

With the increase in reliance on data systems such as cloud computing and remote working, this is a common modern challenge. While these data systems empower organizations and lead to seamless working, it also leaves room for cyber risk if not handled properly.

Data Breaches: An Overview

Whatever the root cause of a data breach, the stolen information can help cyber criminals make a profit by selling the data or using it as part of a wider attack. A data breach typically includes the loss or theft of information such as bank account details, credit card numbers, personal health data, and login credentials for email accounts and social networking sites.

This can be an extremely damaging event, leading to financial losses and a compromised reputation. Stringent data and privacy regulations such as the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) are kept in place to ensure compliance and regulation. However, that is not enough.

To learn more about CIS Controls for Effective Cyber Defense, read here.

Many companies believe that this would never happen to them. That this is a rare, one-off incident. Yet sources show that cybercriminals can access 93% of businesses in an average of two days. In just the first 3 months of 2022, nearly 150 million data records were compromised.

However, what are the next steps? Whom should you contact if personal information may have been exposed?

The Next Steps

Once cybercriminals gain access to confidential information, they could potentially leak billions of stolen and leaked records to the dark web.

Following a data breach, a company needs to implement the following data leak prevention strategies:

1) Act Quickly

Quick action and corroboration with the relevant law enforcement agencies should be the first priority.

The quicker you can respond to a data breach, the minimal the damage will be. Priorly set disaster recovery and incident response plans must be put into immediate effect to limit the scope of the security breach.

A breach lifecycle is usually 277 days, most of which is spent unaware that a data breach existed in the first place.

2) Secure Your Operations and Contain The Breach

On average it can take more than two months to contain a data breach. You should move quickly to secure your systems and fix vulnerabilities. Furthermore, secure all physical areas potentially related to the breach to reduce further damage.

Here are some actions to consider:

• Before determining if the breach was internal or external, disconnect everything from the access point of the malware or threat actor to limit the scope of the attack. However, do so only with the approval of an expert’s advice.
• The IT team needs to collect evidence of the data breach and focus on identifying the compromised systems to isolate them. This information can help the cyber forensic analysis in understanding the cause.
• Restricting access to all critical data. This prevents cybercriminals from gaining further access through employee permissions and allows time for updating firewalls, antivirus, and any other security software.
• Reset passwords for the entire organization in case of other compromised accounts. As a mandatory practice, businesses should reset passwords every six months to a year to prevent such incidents and implement multi-factor authentication (MFA).

• A specialist IT team or data forensics team should be sought. This can help determine when a system is contained and determine the scope of the breach.

3) Perform a Damage Assessment

Once you have quarantined the affected systems, it’s time to investigate how the data breach occurred and what data was compromised.

The first step is to determine the source. Intrusion detection (IDS) and intrusion prevention system (IPS) software automatically log security events, allowing the user to pinpoint the location and time of the data breach.

The damage assessment should investigate if the breach was due to human error or software misconfiguration. This information can prevent the problem from recurring.

4) Identify and Fix Vulnerabilities

Once you know the source of the breach, it makes rectifying the risks and vulnerabilities easier. Real-time threat detection and response tools are of great help here and can help with diagnosis and security.

At this stage, organizations need to examine their entire attack surface. Companies must monitor their entire attack surface for potential vulnerabilities, including the environments of third-party vendors.

A company’s data breach response plan should detail the most important aspects of the system so that security solutions can be prioritized. Short-term and long-term solutions should be balanced to minimize damage and speed up recovery.

Companies like Cybershield CSC come in extremely handy in such situations. With a 24×7 response team, they help manage and mitigate such time-sensitive issues.

5) Notify Affected Parties

When your business experiences a data breach, you need to determine your legal requirements and duties. Depending on the types of information involved in the breach, you need to check which state and federal regulations apply to your situation. Data protection laws such as GDPR and HIPAA require companies to report data breaches within a specified amount of time.

Notify and contact law enforcement immediately. The sooner law enforcement learns about the breach, the more effective it can be. During a cyber breach, time is everything.

Once the data breach has been reported, you need to break the news to the affected parties. This prompt notification allows the affected parties to manage their personal risk by changing passwords or contacting credit bureaus.

Conclusion

In today’s digital landscape, having a designated individual or team for cyber security and defenses is extremely important. In most cases, a CISO (chief information security officer) or a Virtual Chief Information Security Officer is appointed to build IT security responses.

In addition to cyber compliance and regulation, Cybershield CSC is home to experienced vCISOs (Virtual Chief Information Security Officers) who play a huge role in managing an organization’s cybersecurity posture.