When a data breach occurs, asking the right data breach questions is helpful to find the reason for the incident. What are these questions? Let us find out below.
Data Breach Questions
Companies that experienced a data breach, they find that they have a lot of questions, which are:
- What information was involved?
- Which information systems were affected?
- What information needs to be protected?
- How did the hack occur?
- How did the hackers gain access?
- Did the hackers use an existing account or create a new one?
- When did the hack occur?
- Which information was compromised?
- How did the company learn about the breach?
- What are they doing to investigate and mitigate this breach?
- What are they doing to notify victims of the breach?
- Which victims were notified and how were they notified?
- Was notification by phone or mail used?
- Why were the victims notified after 20 days of incident discovery?
- Why was the notification delayed?
- When will the notification be completed?
- How will customers be notified of future incidents of this kind from now on?
- Will customers be notified as soon as possible as in breach notice policy?
- How is personal information being secured during investigation and notification processes?
- What kind of personal information is being held by the company and who has had access to it?
- Is all personal data deleted from a hacked database or is it used for other purposes?
- Is necessary backup made before the investigation and notification processes?
- Does the company have backup and recovery processes in place?
- What kind of security controls is being implemented for causing data breach to not happen again?
- What are the short-term mitigation measures taken to prevent future data breaches?
- Does the company have security audit processes in place to make sure that customers’ personal information is kept secure?
- What are the long-term mitigation measures taken to prevent future data breaches that might happen again in the future? (That is if the company faces another data breach incident)
Why Are Answering These Data Breach Questions Important?
It is important to answer the data breach questions to find out what went wrong and how to prevent a similar data breach from happening again. This is important because it will help companies to take necessary actions to prevent a similar incident from happening again.
When companies answer these data breach questions, they find that they have to do a lot of things such as change or upgrade security controls. They can also implement new security controls. Also, they can keep personal information secure by improving the current security systems, and doing more data protection audits.
How Can A Business Prevent This Incident?
For any business that wants to prevent data breaches, they must consider first the hackers. Hackers are the ones who are capable of causing data breaches. Further, hackers are also the ones who are capable of entering the systems and stealing personal information.
Hackers are not easy to find because there are different kinds of them. They can then be employees, independent hackers, organized criminals, or even nation-states.
A business should also know that hackers have various reasons to cause data breaches. Some might want to steal personal information for financial gain while some might want to cause damage to companies.
