A data breach is a nightmare for any business. Whether hackers took sensitive information from your company’s servers or personal information was posted online, the consequences can be devastating. They may include financial loss, damage to the reputation of your business and even identity theft for employees, customers and business partners.
Fortunately, there are things you can do to prevent a data breach, including installing strong password policies and conducting routine security audits. You should also make sure your employees only use their work computers for business-related activities and that any sensitive files they send via email are encrypted.
It’s important to have a response plan in place in case of a cyberattack, and you should make sure it includes steps such as investigating the attack, determining what was stolen, changing and strengthening passwords, contacting those affected by the breach and monitoring systems and networks for suspicious activity. The average cost of a data breach is $3.9 million, but it can be much higher when you add in other expenses, such as additional threat detection and response, customer notifications, reputational damage and lost prospective business opportunities.
If you have a data breach, you’ll need to work with forensic experts and analyze backup or preserved data to find out what was exposed, when and how. This will help you determine whether the attack involved social engineering, unpatched applications, insider risk or malware. You’ll also want to look at logs and analyze user access to identify unauthorized changes to permissions, login timestamps or API usage.
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