Protection against a data breach is becoming increasingly complex for organizations and everyone should be aware of what can you do after a data breach.
Here are some alarming statistics from various sources:
- Verizon’s Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) reports 75% of cyber-attacks are financially motivated
- World Economic Forum report identified cyberattacks to be “higher than average” in 2019
- Cost of a Data Breach Report from IBM reported a rise to an average of $3.92 million in 2019
- Average size of a data breach equals 25,575 records
Although protection is an essential part of cybersecurity, the odds of a breach are also rising no matter the size of your organization and budgets.
Here is a quick list of the biggest data breaches of 2019 so far:
- Evite: Hacked in February of 2019 and over 10 million exposed names, usernames, email addresses, passwords, dates of birth, phone numbers and mailing addresses.
- Toyota: Data breached in February and March of 2019 saw two separate data breaches of over 3.1 million.
- American Medical Collection Agency (AMCA): Data breach occurred February 2018 and March 2019 of over 20+ million records including medical data and financial information, bank account details including healthcare billing company Optum360.
- Capital One: Breach occurred in March 2019 of over 106 million records of customer personal data including names, addresses, dates of birth, credit scores, Social Security numbers and bank account numbers.
- MongoDB: Data breach in April 2019 of 275 million Indian citizens was exposed including name, sex, date of birth, email, mobile phone number, education details, salary and more.
- Canva: Data breach occurred May 2019 of 139 million records involving personal data such as email addresses, geographic locations, names, passwords, usernames and financial data.
- Desjardins: Data breach occurred June 2019 of 2.9 million records based on an insider-instigated data theft including first and last name, date of birth, social insurance number, address, phone number, email address and details about banking habits.
- Suprema: Data breach occurred August 2019 of 27.8 million records involving biometric data such as fingerprints, facial images, usernames and passwords, employee records and entry logs to secure areas.
Each case was handled differently based on organization but they all had a plan to address the question on this article, what can you do after a data breach?
What Should You Consider to the Cost of a Data Breach?
When examining the cost of a data breach, there are hundreds of factors to consider from detection and notification costs to regulatory fines, legal costs, lost business, and reputation.
Studies have shown the most damage comes from malicious cybercriminal attackers because breaches caused by malicious attackers took much longer to identify and contain. The longer delay to identify and contain a breach gives the attacker move time to move around your network and cause damage.
What Can You Do After a Data Breach?
Here are four things you can do to help cut down on your response time and minimize the financial damage of a data breach. You should review this with your IT department, IT consultant, or managed IT services provider.
- Test Your Incident Response Plan
Do you have an Incident Response Plan? If not, not is the time to develop one. The data breach incident response plan will depend on building it, testing it, and adjusting it. The next part is based executing it. The plan is only as good as the people executing it. Employees must be careful they don’t develop cyber rage and stay calm, cool, and collected. Your IT department or managed IT services provider should be part of the plan.
- Understand Your Risks and Optimize IT Security
It is important to review the importance of your information and data as well as put down the importance of it. Over 51 percent of breaches were caused by malicious or cybercriminal attacks. By having your IT department or managed IT services provider use threat intelligence, it can help provide insights into the different motivations, capabilities and intentions of attackers. This will allow you to understand your risks and make more efficient IT security investments.
- Have a Business Continuity Plan and Back Up Your Systems
Lost business is the largest damage a data breach can cause your organization. Proactive detection, escalation, and notification are a fraction of the cost. Your business continuity plan and backup plan must prevent you from amplifying the issue by shutting down systems, losing data due to destructive attacks, or systems that are costly to recover. Organizations should store backups offline, inaccessible from primary systems, so cybercriminals cannot compromise them.
- Have IT Partners Ready, Just in Case
There are many managed IT services providers in Toronto as well as cloud services providers, and managed security services providers. You should interview several of them to ensure you have found a trusted partner. If your organizations experience a data breach, you have your team ready. If your incident response team is under prepared, they will be little help and limited on how they can contain the cyber attack.
Cyber threats are real, and the cybercriminals are motivated. The only thing that stands between them and your organization’s data is your IT security. Talk to your team and get the tools in place to take action.
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