Understanding Data Breach Recovery

So, what should a company do after a data breach? This initially assumes that you’re capable of detecting that a breach has occurred. If you’re not sure, however, if you would be able to detect a data breach, your first priority is putting a data breach monitoring system in place.
If and when you detect a breach has occurred, follow these steps in order:

• Contact a data security professional. Few business owners have the knowledge and skills necessary to respond to a data breach fully and properly. That’s why it’s important to contact a data security professional as soon as possible. Hopefully you’re already working with an organization that has experience in cybersecurity and data breach response. If not, now is the time to find a vendor. Work quickly so you can respond to the data breach promptly.
• Communicate internally. Next, take the time to communicate internally. Your IT department, business decision makers, and other stakeholders should be aware of what’s happening. This is also a critical opportunity to relay instructions to the rest of your employees so they know how to react. For example, you may require them to stop using the affected systems temporarily.
• Stop the breach. With a data breach professional by your side and some initial communications out of the way, your next priority is stopping the breach, or at least containing it as much as you can. Your goal here is to stop the attack in progress or mitigate the attack to minimize your losses. Sometimes, that means cutting off access to a given system. Sometimes, it means containing the threat so it can’t spread. Your response will vary depending on the nature of the data breach.
• Assess the damage. Once you’ve managed to stop the bleeding, it’s time to assess the damage. How much data was the unauthorized party able to access? Is there any measurable damage to your core systems? What kind of effects will this have on your business? You may not be able to accurately forecast the entire scope of this data breach, but you can at least get started.
• Restore lost data. After that, you’ll need to attempt to restore any data that was lost in the breach. If you’ve been backing up your data regularly, as you should in any cybersecurity strategy, this should be relatively easy. Otherwise, you’ll have your work cut out for you.
• Restore down systems. Downtime is incredibly expensive for any business, so you need to prioritize getting up and running quickly. Still, you should only move forward when you’re confident the threat has been resolved.
• Communicate externally. Once you’ve taken care of these items, you can begin communicating externally. Depending on the nature of your business and the nature of the data breach, that could mean submitting a press release about the data breach and your response to it, sending an email to your investors, or even posting on social media to warn customers that a data breach has occurred.