How to Respond to a Data Breach
If your company has been victim of a Data Breach, you have a lot on your plate. Whether hackers stole personal information from your corporate servers, or someone slipped a flash drive into the wrong cab, the damage can be severe. In addition to legal obligations, you must also work quickly to reassure customers that their information has not been exposed.
The first step is to determine how the breach happened. The 2019 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report identifies nine “patterns” that criminals use, most of which remain consistent year after year. These include phishing attacks, malware, and network vulnerabilities. Another common source of breaches is the physical theft or loss of devices (such as laptops left in hotel rooms or office desks).
Other factors can also cause a Data Breach. For example, a university may experience a breach when staff mistakenly delete alumni contact details from backups that are later restored. While this does not present a high risk to the rights and freedoms of individuals, it would require you to notify those affected.
Once you have a clear understanding of the breach, you can work to mitigate future problems. For example, if a large number of passwords were leaked, you can ask the major credit bureaus to alert consumers. If your business handles account access information for other businesses, you can also advise those institutions to monitor the accounts for suspicious activity. You should also consider implementing network segmentation to prevent one server or site breach from affecting other parts of your network.