How ready are you for a Data Breach event?

Posted on 17 March, 2019 by Administrator

Personal data breaches, commercial information disclosure and state secrets leaked by whistleblowers became regular headlines in online media nowadays. If you just take a look at the statistics published by Forbes here, dynamics and scale of this new threat look really scary:

With an average cost per data breach increasing from year to year, this became a multi-million digital risk field for modern companies, as reported by securityintelligence.com here. Below graph illustrates the trend:

As per the article posted on skyhighnetworks.com:
"There were more breaches in 2014 than any year on record and the Ponemon Institute found the average cost of a data breach jumped 23% in the last two years to $3.79 million."

No matter if your organization is a large multi-national enterprise or a small local non-profit, you still have to be ready for the event of a data breach and have appropriate policies in place in order to mitigate the consequences of the incident faster. According to the same research done by SecurityIntelligence resource, having an "incident response team can reduce the cost of a breach by as much as $14 per compromised record from the average per-capita cost of $148". Such an incident response team should establish a Data Breach Response Plan which will guide through the steps, involve all the responsible parties and help to conceal the breach and reduce the impact. Of course, if you are a smaller enterprise, or a private practice law firm, establishing such policies, hiring a digital forensic expert, or integrating costly Data Loss Prevention software might be a bit of an extra mile to take compared to the risks of actual data loss. That's why in some cases implementing a lower cost solution to help conceal the data leak and identify its source in order to take appropriate corrective measures might be a sound alternative to all those steps. We will talk more about the Data Breach Response Plan and general recommendations by authorities and regulators on the topic which you can implement without huge investments in IT and infrastructure in our future blog posts.

Please stay secure and always be ready for a Data Breach event with all the aspects of the Incident Response Plan covered.