What is data breach protection? How can companies have the right and robust data breach protection in place? If you are interested in knowing, then this article is for you.
Data Breach Protection
Data breach protection is a security term that many companies and organizations use to prevent, detect and respond to data breaches. Also, data breach protection is a combination of several tools and resources. It is not just one tool or resource. It includes, but is not limited to:
Data Encryption
Data encryption is the most common and important resource in data breach protection. All the organizations that handle sensitive consumer data, such as credit card or health information, should use data encryption for their databases and network traffic.
There are numerous free and commercial encryption tools available in the market. Many companies use open-source encryption software such as OpenSSL and Apache’s cryptography libraries. Some companies use commercial encryption tools like McAfee’s SafeGuard and Symantec’s NetBackup in-house developed solutions.
Data Breach Response Plans
This is the second most important part of data breach protection. Every company should have a data breach response plan in place. It should be a part of your company’s business continuity plan so that you can respond fast to a data breach incident when it happens. The plan should include the following steps:
- Detect. If you have an internet-facing site or web application, then there are built-in protections available from the OS level up to your applications to detect malicious activity on your network, network traffic, or website logs e.g., IDS/IPS systems, honeypots, firewalls, etc. You can also use professional services from 3rd party providers for this purpose.
- Investigate. If you have detected something suspicious on your system or network then you need to investigate it further. This is to determine whether the activity is indeed malicious or not.
- Take action. If there is indeed a malicious activity on your system, then you need to take action and remediate it. You can upgrade your software. Then, if there is a software flaw it needs to be fixed. You should also patch the flaw if your software vendor provides patches for that.
Data Breach Notification
The next thing you need to do after a data breach incident is to notify the affected individuals and authorities. This is part of the data breach response plan, but there are some things that you should do during and after the notification:
- Notify law enforcement authorities. If the affected number of individuals is greater than 10,000, then you need to notify law enforcement agencies such as the FBI.
- Notify internal team members about the incident. Notifying your employees is critical so that they can be aware of potential risks and change their passwords if required.
- Notify IT team members about the incident so that they can keep an eye on their systems for further attacks or attempts.
- Inform consumers about their rights and how they can protect themselves from further attacks from this source.
Conclusion
As you can see, data breach protection is a broad term that covers several things. You need to implement all of them to have robust protection in place.