Data breaches are some of the most serious challenges organisations face, regardless of scale and industry. Dealing with a data breach can be incredibly complex, time-intensive, and a worrying situation for any business leader, with recent reports stating that data attack patterns have become more varied, severe, and frequent in the past few years.
Keep Security Front-of-Mind When Digitising
Organisations can ill afford to overlook their security infrastructure and response strategies given the evolving threat landscape of today. When sensitive customer, stakeholder or intellectual property information falls into the wrong hands, the possible outcomes and public scrutiny that arise are almost limitless. Threats range from reputational damage and loss of long-term consumer trust to steep regulatory or compliance fines and stifled operations.
Furthermore, as businesses continue to adapt to and overcome digitisation challenges, security must not take a backseat. With data breaches occurring so often, organisations must take steps to reduce their attack surface and prepare proactive threat containment and response strategies.
How a business responds in the crucial hours after discovering a data breach will dictate how severe the financial or reputational damage will be. By establishing robust response procedures and investing in proactive cyber security solutions from risk and vulnerability assessments, to enterprise-grade penetration testing and ethical hacking exercises, businesses stand a better chance of building a more robust infrastructure.
By extension, malicious actors are less likely to weave their way inside, and stakeholder confidence and assets can be more assuredly safeguarded in the future, even if a breach happens down the line. Nonetheless, when a breach is discovered, there are a few essential steps to follow to avoid it from manifesting into wider, organisation-wide problems.
As millions of UK employees find themselves worried about their employers’ surprisingly lax cyber security procedures, it’s imperative that you are not grouped into that same criteria. Consider the below advice to develop preventative and proactive data breach responses to safeguard operations, data, and assets for both the short and long term.
Assess the Situation Quickly But Carefully
The first step in any data breach assessment is the immediate assembly of relevant appointed breach response personnel, including leadership, IT security professionals, legal representatives and PR departments. The timely gathering of all these parties helps to create a centralised and aligned strategy going forward, at which teams must work rapidly but not hastily.
The identification of systems, software, networks, and data that have been affected is also crucial, as is the root cause. Establishing what has caused the breach and to what extent is the next step, which may take several days to isolate, depending on the complexity of the breach.
If any regulatory bodies need to be informed based on the compromised data types and quantities lost, you should aim to notify them promptly. Documenting all key decisions, discoveries, and mitigation and containment steps is necessary, not just for regulatory and compliance purposes, but for your future in-house policy reviews. Accountability and transparency are key in the initial stages of a breach.
Contain the Breach and Review Security
In some cases, the breach may not be discovered until days later, and such a cyber attack could even still be underway. Expelling intruders and preventing any unauthorised lateral movement will prove vital in these first threat detection stages.
If you have established robust and regular backups of critical systems up to this point, it’s reassuring to know that compromised data can be recovered. If possible, roll back systems to the most recent system patch before the breach took place. At the same time, reset any access controls across the entire organisation’s infrastructure to safeguard any stolen credentials or backdoor access.
Undertake a security review promptly to identify any potential vulnerabilities or loopholes that may have been exploited. Use the uncovered data to implement more methodical updates and patches.
Notify Stakeholders with Care and Transparency
When it comes to informing any individuals whose personal data has been compromised, promptness, clarity, empathy and transparency are necessary in any communication.
Public companies will likely need to disclose any breach activity to third-party regulators, trading authorities, or industry bodies. The UK GDPR introduces a duty on all organisations to report personal data breaches to the relevant supervisory authority, which must be done within 72 hours.
When communicating externally using any branded channels, it’s important to avoid conjecture or speculation and instead stick to known facts or information. Any assumptions or assertions can backfire in a bad way, leading to another host of potential PR or reputation problems.
Restore Trust Through Accountability and Change
Continue your transparent information sharing by outlining the steps the organisation is taking to support victims of the breach, improve security, and ensure this situation does not happen again. Consider offering remedies such as refunds or compensation, if a breach was particularly sensitive and damaging, or, if these are unfeasible, it might be worth offering non-financial perks relevant to your business, products and services.
Outline the lessons learned and security improvements that your organisation plans to take forward immediately. Accept accountability where failures, oversight, and improper controls enabled the breach, and consider the disclosure of actions taken if gross misconduct or negligence was the reason. Individuals do not have to be named and shamed, necessarily, but rather a prompt, decisive, and unambiguous acknowledgement of their dismissal can suffice.
The Road to Recovery
Balancing the quick, decisive, and careful actions needed following a crisis like a data breach is no easy feat. Speed and accuracy are two important factors in any organisation’s response steps, which means that business leaders have to direct and delegate with confidence and precision. Alerting stakeholders will usually be the remit of the senior management team, while internal teams can handle relevant technical and procedural tasks pertaining to threat containment and isolation.
Mistakes can happen that enable these types of incidents to take place, with many cyber attacks usually resulting from human error. It happens – there is no avoiding it. However, it’s how companies respond in the face of public scrutiny that’s most pivotal in rebuilding trust among consumers and stakeholders. The most important factor in any threat or breach response strategy is to accept responsibility, keep all relevant parties informed regularly, and close any critical security gaps that were exposed by the breach. Doing so will demonstrate thoroughness and readiness to change and adapt going forward, to prevent another incident from happening again.
While cyber attacks can always happen unexpectedly, preparing response procedures as much as possible in advance will help organisations weather the proverbial storm. In the rapidly evolving and dangerous threat landscape of today, maintaining a resilient approach is going to be as much of a priority as safeguarding data itself.
