Data Breach Recovery: 7 Steps Your Company Should Take
As breach attempts increase, it's important to know how to take action
Data breaches are on the rise. According to the 2021 Annual Data Breach Report from the Identity Theft Resource Center, 2021 saw a 68 percent increase in data breaches compared to 2020. This is a massive increase, and it should be a significant cause for concern for any business.
Both large corporations and small businesses are victims of data breaches. The hope is that it never happens to your business, but if it does, it’s important to have a data breach recovery plan in place.
As the largest provider of data breach response services, we’ve seen it all. We’ve worked with Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, healthcare organizations, private companies, and others — both to create breach recovery plans beforehand, or to respond to a current breach. In this post we’ll share a few things we deem essential to a solid data breach recovery plan.
Here are 7 steps you need to include in your data breach recovery plan:
1. Follow data breach reporting requirements
After a data breach, it’s crucial to inform both employees and clients or customers of the breach. Not only is this the right thing to do, but each state has laws for security breach disclosure when it pertains to personal information. It’s very important to learn and understand the data breach notification requirements in your state.
Trying to hide a data breach could be a big mistake with long-lasting consequences. You could face lawsuits due to the mishandling of private information. Perhaps even worse than the legal consequences is the hit that your reputation could take if you are not fully transparent about a data breach. A survey suggests that 64% of consumers say they would blame the company and not the hacker if their personal data was stolen, and 71% say they would stop doing business with a company if it gave away sensitive data without permission.
If you try to hide a data breach, word will eventually get out. And when it does, public perception of your organization is going to become extremely negative.
2. Update your security
When a data breach occurs, your IT team should get to work immediately to determine where and how the breach occurred. Once this is identified, any vulnerabilities that were exploited by hackers must be patched immediately. Part of this process will include changing any administrative passwords, as they are almost certain to be compromised as well.
3. Penetration test your updated systems
After your IT team has implemented its fixes for the security weaknesses, it’s important to put those fixes to the test quickly. The same method that was used to hack your systems should be used in testing to ensure that the fix was successful. All servers and virtual machines need to be tested before you can be confident that the issue has been resolved.
4. Refresh your staff on data breach protocols
All employees should understand the proper protocols for handling data breaches. This goes for members of your IT team as well as other employees who may be affected in some way. For example, your customer support team is likely dealing with many frustrated customers after the data breach is disclosed. They need to understand how to navigate this delicate situation.
Since many data breaches occur due to compromised passwords, employees should also be regularly refreshed on their cybersecurity training. This includes watching out for phishing emails, creating strong passwords, and keeping those passwords secure. This training should be given regularly, but a data breach calls for an additional refresher.
Many employees have never dealt with a data breach situation before, so it’s important to make sure everyone is on the same page with the procedures should a breach happen to occur.
5. Invest in a data breach response solution
Nothing serves as a bigger wake-up call to the potential cybersecurity risks than experiencing a significant data breach. It would be best to invest in a breach response solution before one occurs, but it’s never too late to prepare for another possible breach.
The data breach response solution from IDX can help you before, during, and after a data breach. The service will help with pre-breach incident response handling. This will ensure that your company is prepared and precisely understands your breach response protocols.
IDX works with your privacy attorney to determine the most efficient breach response for your company. The data breach response solution also includes notification services when a breach occurs and a U.S.-based call center.
IDX's Priority Response No Cost Master Services Agreement ensures that you are prepared if a breach occurs, and you only incur costs if you need to use data breach services. This adds peace of mind without the stress of rising costs for a service that you hope you never need to use.
6. Get cyber liability insurance
If you don’t already have cyber liability insurance, a data breach is a reminder of how important insurance can be. After all, breaches can occur at any moment, so there’s no guarantee that another one isn’t right around the corner.
Cyber liability insurance policies can help protect against losses incurred due to a data breach. Losing data itself could lead to significant monetary losses, and there’s also the possibility of settlement payments if highly sensitive data was compromised.
Liability insurance will add an extra layer of protection to your company to ensure that you’re better protected against any future breaches.
7. Support your employees
When a data breach occurs in your organization, it can have a lasting effect on the mindset of your employees. Even if their information wasn’t part of the data breach, it can lead to concerns for their private information. A great way to help put your staff’s minds at ease is by providing cybersecurity services as an employee benefit.
IDX’s Employee Protection Solutions are a win-win for both the company and the employee. Among the features of this benefit package are:
Adding privacy & identity theft protection to your benefits package will protect your employees and will help them recover if they do experience identity theft. It is also beneficial to the company, as a significant portion of data breaches occur due to an employee’s information becoming compromised.
Breach recovery in a nutshell: plan, act, pivot
The key takeaway here is that data breach response begins by properly planning for a potential data breach. This means making sure your staff understands the protocols and receives proper cybersecurity training.
After a breach does occur, it’s your IT team’s time to work on identifying the cause of the breach, fixing it, and testing that fix. This should be done immediately upon recognizing that a breach has occurred to prevent additional hackers from taking advantage of the same security vulnerability.
Finally, every breach is different, which means there will be lessons learned. Take what you’ve learned from this breach and use it to adjust your breach response protocols as needed. You can also learn from these past security breaches from major corporations. It’s also worth investing in a Data Breach Response solution to help with the entire response and recovery process.
IDX provides several enterprise cybersecurity solutions. You can get started today and ensure your organization has all the solutions it needs to protect against cybercrime.
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