Does your company have a solid data breach plan? If not, how do you make one that is solid, efficient, and effective? If you want to know the answer, keep on reading.
Data Breach Plan
To begin, a data breach plan is a document that details precisely what you should do if a data breach occurs. A comprehensive data breach plan needs to include prevention, detection, response procedures. In addition, there should be a contingency plan for when a breach occurs as well as a post-breach clean-up plan.
Prevention
Preventing a data breach is going to be your best bet to ensure that one doesn’t occur. There are several things you can do to prevent a data breach from happening. You can harden your networks, use firewalls and antivirus software, implement password protection on devices, and make sure to keep software updated.
In addition, you should keep track of all the devices that have access to your data and have an inventory of all devices within your company that may contain sensitive information. To help prevent a data breach from occurring, you can set up access controls that limit who has access to certain information and monitor for suspicious activity.
Detection
The next step in the process is to detect a breach if one happens. There are several ways you can detect a data breach if it occurs. You should monitor the device logs and audit the activities of users regularly. Then, you can also install an early warning system or create rules that flag certain activities for review.
Another way to detect breaches is by using behavioral analytics. Also, you can use behavior models to determine normal user activities and flag anyone who deviates from that norm.
When detecting breaches, you must have detection mechanisms in place.
Response Procedures
After detection comes to the response. There are a few things you should do after a breach occurs. First, you need to have a data breach response plan that details what to do after a breach occurs. In addition, you should have a clear communication plan that states who you will be communicating with. This also includes what information you will provide to them as well as how long it will take to complete the investigation.
In addition, after a breach occurs, you should review your logs and audit trails to determine what happened and how it happened. Detection mechanisms can detect a data breach if one occurs. However, detection is not enough. You also need response procedures detailing what to do once one is detected.
Post-breach Clean-up Plan
Of course, after the breach occurs, you need to clean up after it. This includes determining the scope of the breach, notifying impacted individuals, reducing the risk of future breaches, and implementing safeguards to keep this from happening again.
For example, you should review your security policies and update them as needed. Also, you should consider hiring a third party to conduct a breach investigation and then determine what went wrong and how it can be prevented in the future.
Then, you can then share that information with your employees so they know what happened and how to prevent something like this from happening again.
