“I’ve been breached” – the most feared words no business executive wants to hear. Facing federal fines, public panic, upset customers, and a loss of IP property – these are every organization’s nightmare. A data breach can be a dreadful ordeal. If you are not prepared to react promptly after discovering the breach, your condition can instantly get worse.
You should take several critical steps immediately after a breach to limit the consequences from hour zero.
According to a recent study of IBM, the companies, which had a tested incident response plan for a breach saved, 51% on the average data breach cost compared to those that didn’t.
So, how do you become robust after a breach with advanced security tools? How can they minimize the consequence of a breach? Here are our tips for moving from the shock to the action of “what do I do now?”
What is a Data Breach?
A Data breach is a security incident where secure, private, or confidential information is stolen from a system by cybercriminals without the authorization of the owner. A breach can happen either unexpectedly or because of an intentional attack. Attackers who attempt data breaches target financial data like credit card numbers and login credentials. With those data, they can then attempt further attacks or resold them in underground markets.
Verizon’s 2020 data breach investigation reports state that external threats cause 70% of the data breaches. However, the Global insider data breach 2020 survey from Egress Software Technologies alerts that 97% of IT security leaders are concerned over the insider data breach.
What Is the Impact of Data Breaches?
Not all data breaches are equal – the impact of data breaches on a company varies based on the kind of data, volume, and applicable regulations. However, they all receive severe negative consequences that include stolen data, legal investigations and fines, customer mistrust, and recovery efforts. These sheer financial costs finally damage or weaken a company.
Cost of A Data Breach – Must Know Statistics!
The study of IBM, 2020 found that the average time to discover and mitigate a data breach was 280 days. The speed of response can significantly lessen the breach costs as shown below:
Source: IBM
IBM Security Cost of a Data Breach Report 2020
The cost of a data breach report divides total cost into four categories:
Further, the loss of customer trust is extensive. Studies reveal that around 65% to 80% of customers will lose trust in a company that experienced a breach. The consequence? Millions in lost.
Minimize the Impact of Data Breaches with Advanced Security Technologies
1. Prevention is Key
Enterprises should adopt preventive measures to avoid the risk of a Data breach happening. Proactive security strategies must be in place to ensure ultimate data breach protection. In this digital age, breach prevention measures require advanced security technologies like web application firewall, Data encryption, malware protection, backup, intrusion detection and mitigation, log management, and vulnerability scanning.
2. You have undergone a data breach. Now what?
- If you need to comply with the GDPR, you must report the breach to the authorities within 72 hours of a data security breach.
- Deliver forthright notifications to those affected, both external and internal. Large delays in notifications make the customer feel you’re hiding something or not considering their data seriously.
- Contact your cyber insurance provider to make sure you’ll have sufficient financial stability to pay for various services to fix data leaks, like hiring a resource to investigate and contain the incident.
3. Invest in Incident Response and Threat Intelligence Solutions
Management of a security incident does not end with the legal statement and customer notification. Now the hard part comes – investigating and fixing risks as soon as possible. It is crucial to investigate every data security breach, which bypassed your security barriers. Your first step should be to detect how threat actors exploited your organization and disable the threat. Automate your incident response through advanced technologies like threat detection and response tools.
Investigating the breach thoroughly and quickly with an incident response as well as security automation not only mitigates destruction but shows an extensive impact on cost-saving and prevents further damage to your reputation. Most importantly, your ability to react to the breach transparently can build further trust with customers. It is generally not the breach itself, but the inability of the business to react to those breaches with transparency and demonstrating steps to prevent it in the future to their customers that impact their business more than the breach itself. Incident response and threat intelligence besides providing risk mitigation also enable the business to respond to breaches quicker, with better communique, and win the trust of the customer even during the toughest of times.
Threat intelligence aids to get insights into the hacker’s motivations, intentions, and capabilities, enabling you to assess the risks and make appropriate security investments.
4. Secure Your Data and System
After a breach, you need to secure your systems and limit further data loss right away. It could save you an average of $164,386, according to IBM’s 2020 study.
However, you need to ensure you do it in the right way:
1. Perform Security Audit to Prevent Further Breach
Once the threat of the breach has been identified and fixed, it doesn’t mean everything is ok and the rest of your cybersecurity system will do their jobs. It is high time to perform cyber audits and vulnerability assessments to address other vulnerabilities in the system right away to defend against another cyber breach and limit your business’s further consequences.
2. Encrypt Everything
Numerous cost reducers can aid in reducing the impact of data security breaches either preventatively or subsequently. While data loss prevention, encryption, threat intelligence, and integrating security into the SDLC process. It can play a major role in minimizing the impact of a data breach. Extensive use of encryption seems to have the greatest impact by reducing an average of $360, 000 – according to IBM’s cost of data breach 2019.
Though encryption doesn’t protect you from hacking, it can make your sensitive data useless to attackers even if it is hacked. This is illustrated by the uselessness of encrypted passwords and PINS to cybercriminals. Data has no value unless it is viewed and being used.
3. Hack Yourself with Red Team Testing to Forecast Further Attacks
If you’re more likely to get breached, it is better to make someone hack it intentionally. This approach exploits the weak points in your system before the hackers would. This will help to discover logical weaknesses that automated scanners can’t detect. Red testing helps to tighten up your system, and you’ll be more prepared if the real attack happens. Red team exercises showed a high impact on reducing data breach costs.
Through penetration testing and Red team testing uses similar kinds of tools, the goal of these methods differs from each other. The red team assesses active security while pen-testing checks the passive security of your information system.
To safely perform a red team test and leverage the maximum advantage out of it, make sure you have solid security measures in place and are well prepared to face a variety of attacks.
Are You Prepared for a Data Breach?
Take the effort to reduce the impacts of a data breach through rapid response plans and advanced security technologies. The best method of damage reduction is attack prevention. Before a data breach hits, invest in effective risk management and compliance solutions to prepare our organization for the worst.
With the help of Indusface’s web Application Scanning, penetration testing, web application protection, bot mitigation, and cyber hunt, you can stay one step ahead of threat actors and thwart the worst from happening.
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