What to do When Your Business Experiences a Data Breach?

Posted by Joseph Franks on September 27th, 2019

Out of many white-collar crimes, today, data breaches have become the top concern for business owners. With the rise in the frequency and severity of the breaches, their cost has also risen. According to 2016 Cost of Data Breach Study, the average cost of a breach was .1 million for US companies and million worldwide. The report further stated that the incident response team decreased the cost of the lost record.

Cybersecurity is no longer the domain of IT alone. Rather, it has become a critical aspect of the business of an organization. For that matter, organizations must have a response plan to deal with the incidents of breaches.

Following a data breach, here is what your organization should do:

1. Analyze What Data is Compromised:

First thing first. Ask your IT consultant to figure out what and how much data was compromised, how many clients are affected, and how did the breach occur. If there is any security flaw in your software or network, fix it immediately.

2. Coordination with the Internal Response Team:

You may have hired a cyber-security team to deal with day-to-day security matters, it is essential to hire an external IT cybersecurity team or company that have trained professionals in data breach detection and are able to coordinate with the internal response team.

3. First 48 Hours:

Identify the affected business, customers or clients and determine the level of exposure. Collect and preserve all metadata that includes stolen passwords, malware breaches, phishing or social media attacks. Keep the document unaltered separately as well as, establish protocols to protect the data.

It is essential to prepare an initial security breach report to provide to the insurance companies, stockholders, financial institutions and board of directors, in case of the public company. Moreover, consult a legal counsel to see what laws are applicable in the country your business is operating.

You can also take help from a cyber crime attorney to know what to do further.

4. Customer and Media Response:

It is essential to activate customer response center and company media to deal with the customers, media, emails, and queries coming through social media accounts; be honest and communicate with them about the incident. Post information on your website, set up a call center and other means of communication for complaints.

5. Offer Your Customers with Identity Theft Prevention:

For businesses, it is a common practice to offer their customers credit card protection. Consider providing them fraud prevention services after a breach. Although, this type of protection prevents theft and fraud, however, it is not cheap. You have to pay for these services and dedicate a person to answer customers’ queries as well as explain to them how your business will protect your customers’ information.

6. Devise an Incidence Response Plan:

The first step towards dealing with these incidents is to have a plan at hand that will explain the roles and responsibilities of the security officials as well as the impacted departments that have to deal with the security breach. The plan gives the security officials direct procedures that should be utilized while analyzing the level of the data breach and vulnerability about further security risk to the infrastructure of the company.

Quick response after the breach is essential to further loss of data. Having an effective plan at hand with sufficient training of IT security professionals strengthens cybersecurity of a business.

Author Bio:

Business law firm in Houstonhas dedicated their lives to the craft and stand by your side throughout the entire case, should you have any questions or concerns about the process.