Your team member accidentally exposes sensitive data. How will you prevent future security breaches?

First move is to contain the breach. That could mean segmenting the breached "container" from other parts of the network so no that nothing else is negatively impacted. You want to try and reduce the risk of losing any more data as soon as possible. There is a chance everyone might not be on board with this if the impacted container is consistently used during daily operations, but it's for the best. For response action and communications, you want to identify the data that was lost and who/what that lost data would impact the most (customers, operations, IP, dev, etc). Depending on who that loss impacts, it could scale your plan of recovery and mitigation accordingly.

When a data breach occurs, time is crucial: - Contain the breach: Identify exposed data, revoke unnecessary access, and implement temporary safeguards. 🔒 - Assess the extent: Understand the scope of the exposure and its potential impact. 📊 - Communicate promptly: Inform affected parties transparently to manage expectations. 📢 - Prepare for investigation: Lay the groundwork for a thorough review of breach causes. 🕵️♂️ Acting swiftly can mitigate damage and facilitate a comprehensive investigation.

Policy Review: - Assess comprehensiveness: Scrutinize existing policies for potential gaps and vulnerabilities. 🕵️♂️ - Update for stricter controls: Enhance access controls and data handling protocols. 🔐 - Clarify reporting guidelines: Ensure clear procedures for reporting security threats. 📝 - Reduce future risks: Strengthen policies to mitigate the likelihood of future breaches. 🛡️ Regular policy reviews and updates bolster defenses against data breaches, ensuring robust security measures are in place.

While we'd like to assume that quarterly and annual user awareness training on pre and post breach events is commonplace these days; it would be foolish to think all are up to par. It might be good for the leadership team to go through a tabletop exercise of what happened that can be broken down into laymen's terms for the non-security folks; meanwhile idenitifying how the breach occurred, threat actors and actions, potential identification of actors and actions taken to stop further data loss and mitigate against future breaches. Training your folks on what to look for will go a long way at closing the gaps of human error, input validation, or just not being congnizant of where you're going on the web.