A data breach could take over 100 days to be spotted. An additional 60 days may be needed to recover from it. However, you can recover from a breach within 30 days with a recovery plan, saving you resources. Your recovery team’s swift reaction to any signs of a data breach will help you recover as soon as possible.
Follow these steps to recover after a data breach.
What to do after a data breach
A comprehensive data recovery plan is essential for a quick response once a breach has been identified. Assigning a recovery team to assess, respond, and recover the data is crucial once a data breach has occurred.
After a breach, removing the affected data, increasing your monitoring, and conducting network security penetration testing are key components of an effective recovery plan.
1. Remove affected data
The first step to take after a data breach is to remove the affected data. Remove all the information breached on your website and contact search engines so they do not store a backup of the information. It is also crucial to search for the affected data and make sure that it has not been kept on other websites.
Once you have removed the affected data, ensure that your response team has documented what information has been attacked. Then, ensure that experts analyse the findings during their investigation into the breach.
2. Increase monitoring
After a data breach, your company should focus on improving its data privacy security to ensure that monitoring of your servers is increased. This is vital so that your team can investigate where the initial breach occurred.
Cyberattacks will often try to attack your server a second time because they already have the information on how to breach your data. If they decide to attack again, your response team can be ready to identify it as soon as possible.
3. Conduct a penetration test
A network security penetration test reveals the vulnerabilities of your servers’ infrastructure. A penetration test, also called pen testing, is a synthetic cyberattack on your own data. This will assess where potential weaknesses exist within your application systems and servers to analyse the strengths of your data privacy security system. Penetration testing tools help your business protect servers and data to prevent breaches.
Be aware of what not to do
Besides knowing what to do after a data breach, you should also consider what to avoid doing after a breach occurs. After a data breach, do not keep it a secret. Let your employees know about the breach to keep them in the know about what to say if asked about it.
You should also inform your customers if the data breach affected your website or leaked some of their personal information. Letting employees and customers know that you are handling the breach keeps everyone’s minds at ease.
Also, do your due diligence to keep the evidence you documented after the breach to help the investigation and prevent future breaches of your servers.
Prevention is better than cure
Whether your business has experienced a data breach or not, invest in systems that will prevent it from happening and be prepared to fight a cyberattack. LRQA offers penetration testing and more cybersecurity services to protect your clients, partners and third parties' data.