What to do After the Breach?

There is no shortage of advice of ways to try and prevent a data breach. But if it happens to you, do you have a plan of precisely what to do next? Very few retailers do.Before we delve into what you should do next—and the fact that you really need to get your teams together and figure it out now (think of it as Data Breach Disaster Recovery Plan)—let’s look at why this is such a difficult area. In the last couple of years, a veritable who’s who of major retailers have been breached, including TJX, Hannaford, 7-Eleven, Target, J.C. Penney, BJ’s Wholesale, Boston Market, Sports Authority, Dave & Buster’s, Office Max, Barnes & Noble, Forever 21 and DSW. And that’s merely a partial list of the ones we know about.And in almost every one of those cases, the cyber thieves entered those networks, rummaged around, copies GBytes of payment data and related files, transferred that data to themselves and left—all without the retailers detecting any alarms. Invariably, it was the card brands—and sometimes the U.S. Secret Service—that detected the fraud days, weeks, months and sometimes years later and then circled back to give a heads up to the retailers involved.That’s complicating factor Number One: You’re likely to learn of the breach long after it’s been halted by the thieves themselves. That tends to fuel (continue reading...)