A data breach can take place no matter how advanced you train your staff, how much you safeguard your confidential data and info. But know that there is no need to panic if you already have a solid Incident Response Plan or IRP. It keeps you on track to do things to get under control again. If you don’t have such plan ready, now is the time to do so. You need to get in touch with experienced professionals at Elijaht to guide you. If you have an IRP in place, you need to notify the operations professionals and business stakeholders of your company immediately when a breach takes place. This plan lets you:
- Preserve the proof involved in the breach
- Stop the data leak
- Return to the normal status of operations ASAP
The IRP or Incident Response Plan
The security risks and the legal requirements evoked by a data breach tend to differ from the nature of industries, states, and countries as well. Hence, it is necessary to be prepared as an integrated approach simply won’t work. A stringent IRP will take all stringent consideration to your company’s specific needs, operations and legal compliance issues which are exceptional to your industry and your location. Your IRP will also be required to outline a few particular steps, so that you can cope with any sort of legal requirements resulting from a data breach, no matter if it was a matter of theft, hacking or human error.
The response team
An accurate IRP delineates accurately who is on the response team and what their designated roles are. Line them up in advance, and before anything happens, it will assure you that you can take prompt action. Everyone is kept well apprised on their roles and what they have to do. This is an essential step as every second matters. The team should entail security experts, IT managers, marketing experts to protect the brand image, lawyers who are well apprised with the due diligence and regulatory compliance, business stakeholders, contractors and third parties, if needed.
Keep the evidence safe
You will need proof of everything that happened and when, to keep a recurrence at bay. Hence, it is important to keep a track and preserve the proof in a forensically sound manner to guarantee a successful post breach audit. Most of the proof you need to keep safe will be time sensitive in nature, so you need to keep a swift action ready as well. At least, you will be required to document the following:
- Network connections
- Timestamps for important data files
- Log-ins
- Packet captures
- Memory dumps
- Process lists
- User accounts
- Access privileges
- Network traffic
