HOW WE APPROACH A DATA BREACH SCENARIO

Our data breach investigation consists of the following steps:

Detecting The Breach
Responding With Proper Actions
Gathering Evidence
Analyzing The Breach
Taking Necessary Measures
Notifying All Related Parties
Conducting Post-Event Activities

Detecting The Breach

Every investigation begins by detecting the incident. First, we determine if a data breach has occurred, and we do it by looking for different signs of a data breach. There are two types of signs for a data breach incident: precursors and indicators. Precursors carry signs that an incident might occur later, while indicators show an incident that’s already happened, or is in progress.

Responding With Proper Actions

Once we determine that a data breach has occurred, we record the date and time of detection immediately, along with collecting as much primary information about the event as possible. Once the breach has been identified and documented, we restrict access to breached data to prevent further leaks.

Gathering Evidence

We then collect every piece of tangible evidence from the event. Data is collected from every tool, server, and network device available. The data includes:

Date and time of the breach
Date and time of initiating a response to the event
Information about who discovered reported, and knew about the breach
Description of stolen data
Description of events related to the incident
Information of all contacts involved in the incident
Information on the severity of damage caused by the incident

Analyzing The Breach

After we’ve gathered every piece of evidence that we can, we start analyzing them to determine the entry point of the breach. We have a questionnaire prepared to help with the investigation.

Did we detect any suspicious traffic?
Did the attacker have privileged access to the breached data?
Was the data compromised for a long time?
Did the attackers use any sophisticated tools for the breach?
Was the data breach intentionally done by someone from the inside?
If it was done by an insider, were outside attackers involved in the incident as well?

Taking Necessary Measures

After determining the cause and the perpetrator of the incident, we start taking measures to stop any further leaks. There are three main countermeasures to a data breach incident:

Containment: In this step, we isolate every compromised device to stop the breach from spreading any further. Any device can spread the data breach infection in case it's caused by malware, so isolating the devices to contain the breach is the most ideal solution.
Eradication: Once all the devices are contained, we proceed to remove the cause of the data breach. It can either be malware or a security loophole that the attacker used to gain access. We remove all malwares and patch up all security loopholes, stopping the current breach.
Recovery: Once the ongoing data breach has been completely stopped, we proceed to recover all the lost data, and get the system reinstated back to being operational.

Notifying All Related Parties

Once we’ve completely sustained the situation, we notify all affected parties and law enforcement, because we believe in operating with full compliance with the law. Timely notification of all breach events is crucial since it helps law enforcement agencies, as well as the organization to take proper steps based on the information provided in the reports. Here are the people who we inform right away:

Employees
Customers
Investors
Business partners
Regulators
Law enforcement agencies

Conducting Post-Event Activities

After we finish all necessary activities during and after the post-data breach, we perform post-even activities that ensure that further data breaches don’t happen. The best way to do it is to perform an audit of the entire system. The audit includes:

Reviewing the company’s systems
Analyzing the cause of the breach
Creating plans to battle future data breaches
Reviewing and reforming the security policies to strengthen them
Regulators
Improving security awareness among employees

Why Choose TechForing

Our team of experts have previous experience with major-scale data breach incidents
We use the best tools available for the job to get to the bottom of the matter as fast as possible
Our process is transparent and we provide documentation for every step
Our services are upfront and detailed, and we only accept compensation for successful tasks. As a result, you don’t have to worry about hidden charges or extra fees
We offer pre and post event consultancy so that your organization can continue to be safe
We provide employee training modules to increase cybersecurity awareness among your employees