A data breach can hit any industry, including healthcare, retail, financial services, and communications. Planning to avoid a breach is always the first priority, because the best response is stopping one before it starts. Still, breaches do and will occur. Your business needs a separate plan for the legal, business, and technical decisions you must make the moment a breach happens.
Key methods to deal with a security breach
The essential components of any data breach plan include:
Assess the damage from the data breach
- Execute the Disaster Recovery Plan. Every company should have a disaster recovery plan in place before a breach occurs. The plan should cover hardware, software, and data, and cloud servers are a key component. Your team should review computer logs to examine firewall breaches and other activity, so you can compare how the system ran before and after the breach.
- Evaluate the Business Impact of the Breach. Determine which economic losses the breach caused and put a dollar value on each one. Insurance companies won’t pay unless you can verify and account for the losses. Good valuation means taking regular inventory of your assets and working with your accounting office to verify damages, such as loss of income, in case you cannot recover some assets.
- Review Damage to Intellectual Property and Company Trade Secrets. Find out whether thieves stole or damaged valuable business assets, so you can make sound decisions. For example, you may decide to prosecute wrongdoers, if possible, and defend against any use of the property by the people who stole it.
- Review Damage to Customer Data. You will have to decide whether to restore all backed-up data or repair the current data that was damaged. Restoring from backups always means the business loses its most recent entries.
Find the cause and bring in the right people
- Determine Why and How the Breach Occurred. Find out whether the breach was internal or external to the company. Once you know the motive and have taken the steps to minimize economic damage, review how to prevent future breaches. Where were the gaps in your existing security measures? Your disaster recovery plan is a good place to start, and third-party advisory services for data breaches, such as data centers, can review it with you. Your IT department should also review the information system infrastructure.
- Cooperate with Local Law Enforcement. If you suspect criminal conduct, be ready to review the incident with local law enforcement. Federal and international agencies, such as Homeland Security, may also join the investigation. Cooperation can help stop any misuse of your data and prevent future attacks.
- Understand the Legal Liability Issues. Inform your legal department of the breach for several reasons:
- To help in the investigation
- To make sure you meet regulatory compliance issues and notice requirements
- To prepare for customer complaints, especially if someone misuses the data.
Most important next steps you should take
Every data manager or IT manager has a different idea of the one crucial next step after a data breach. One of the most important steps is communication. Notify everyone in the company who needs to know about the breach. Notify clients, and prepare a press release. The notices should indicate, to the extent the company knows:
- Why the breach occurred
- What steps the company is taking to mitigate the breach
- What steps the company is taking to prevent future breaches.
The purpose of these notices is twofold: to apologize, and to inform. Educate everyone on the steps you are taking, and can take, to minimize future breaches. The company should also follow legal notice requirements for computer breaches.
Be prepared to act the moment a data breach occurs
The time to get ready for a data breach is not when the breach occurs. It is months, or even years beforehand. Companies should review and update breach recovery guides with their internal IT department and with any third party advisory services for data breaches. Data centers can be a valuable resource because they know many of the legal, practical, and technical issues, and they have developed their own breach security guidelines. To prepare for a potential breach now, call Volico at (305) 735-8098 and get help from our professionals.
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