With data breaches becoming common, a data breach incident response plan has become necessary for businesses to avoid financial losses, reputational damage, and costly lawsuits.
According to a report, more than six million data records were exposed due to data breaches in the first quarter of 2023, and the global average cost of these breaches amount to a mammoth $4.45 million.
Having a data response plan guides your team to take the right action, contact the right people, and ensure the data breach doesn’t extend to other sensitive information.
In this guide, we’ll highlight the common types of data security breaches and six simple steps to help deal with them.
What is Data Security Incident Response?
Data security incident response is a plan you make to deal with security breaches once they happen. Instead of covering technologies like cyber asset attack surface management that help prevent these attacks from happening, these response plans guide your organization to reduce the damage and cost of a cyberattack. This plan aims to fix the cause so future attacks can be prevented.
Instead of doing everything at once, these pre-planned steps help your team focus on the critical things.
Types of Security Incidents
The seven common types of security incidents are:
- Unauthorized access attacks: This involves unauthorized attempts made by a cybercriminal to access systems or data.
- Insider threat attacks: This happens when someone in your organization attempts to steal intellectual property or confidential data.
- Phishing attacks: The attacker impersonates a reputable organization or personnel and sends spammy links to collect login credentials or banking information.
- Malware attacks: Here, malware (malicious software) executes unauthorized actions on the victim’s system.
- Password attacks: This aims at obtaining a user’s password details using methods such as dictionary attacks, password sniffers, password cracking programs, etc.
- DDoS (Distributed Denial-of-Service) attacks: This happens when a threat actor overwhelms a website with a flood of traffic to deny access to real users.
- MITM (Man in the Middle) attacks: Hackers position themselves as middlemen between users and intercept and manipulate their communication.
6 Steps for a Successful Data Breach Incident Response Plan
Below are six incident response steps to take once a data breach has occurred:
1. Detect the Data Breach Source
Your incident response (IR) team should first identify the cause of the breach before resolving it.
The indicators for a data breach could be many, like:
- Your security products alert you based on analysis of log data.
- Users, network administrators, security staff, and others from your organization have trouble logging in to their systems.
- Some important files or data have been altered.
- You have received a lot of bounce emails with suspicious content.
2. Take Necessary Response Actions
Some urgent actions that you should take after detecting a data breach are:
- Document the date and time of the breach
- Notify the IR team
- Restrict access to breached information so it doesn’t spread further.
- Interview those who identified the breach
- Perform a risk assessment
- Notify external parties who are at risk
- Get in touch with law enforcement
3. Gather Evidence and Analyze the Data Breach
Gather intelligence about the data breach. This involves using your network devices, cybersecurity tools, and servers to find details on what information was breached, how it was breached, the systems affected by the threat, and the type of damage caused.
Once you know these details, analyze them by asking the following questions:
- Did you detect any suspicious traffic?
- How did the attacker try to steal the data? Did they have any kind of access?
- Did the attack result from an external attack on servers?
- Was there any inside personnel involved in the breach?
- Do you think any special software was involved?
- Are your systems secure? Or are there any loopholes?
Based on the answers to these questions, you can take further action.
4. Take Containment, Eradication, and Recovery Measures
You can prevent more data from leaking with three countermeasures:
- Containment: Isolate compromised servers, computers, and files to contain the damage. Also, ensure evidence is not lost during this process.
- Eradication: Eliminate the threats. For example, if the data breach was due to malware, patch the exploited vulnerabilities and clean the system. If it was an insider threat, disable the accounts of those that leaked data.
- Recovery: Restore normal functioning by ensuring the threat no longer exists, changing passwords, installing patches, and cleaning the affected systems to restore them to a fully operational state.
5. Initiate the Notification Process
You should notify all affected parties when a data breach happens, irrespective of whether your national laws oblige you to inform them.
It enables the affected parties to safeguard their data and ensure this breach does not spread to many businesses.
Depending on the kind of breach, you may have to notify your employees, customers, regulators, business partners, or investors.
You may also need to check your state’s privacy requirements to determine whether you need to inform other organizations to avoid legal action. You must check the same for all locations if your organization operates in multiple locations.
6. Follow-Up and Review
Once you have successfully resolved the data breach, put measures in place to ensure similar types of breaches don’t occur in the future.
For example, if a security threat occurred because an employee opened a spammy link by mistake, implement a company-wide policy or communication on how to spot phishing scams and prevent them from occurring.
You can also take steps to spread awareness about cybersecurity within your teams, adopting tools and technology to monitor threats, patching server vulnerabilities, getting in touch with your cloud service provider to secure your online data, etc.
Stay Safe by Creating a Data Security Incident Response Plan
Preparing for data threats in advance strengthens your cybersecurity in general and provides a guideline for your team on how to act. You can even provide this plan during training when a new colleague joins your team so there are fewer chances of unintentional data breaches.
Start by creating a plan based on the steps given above and tweak them to match your organization’s requirements. Also, review and modify this plan regularly with technology updates and new adoption of cybersecurity best practices.
It’s time to safeguard your organization’s data with a comprehensive data security incident response plan.
