Can Your Business Detect A Cyber Breach?
In past blogs, we have discussed whether you could spot an online scam, a phishing email or spoofing signs. These are all skills that can help protect your
individual devices and information. On the business side, can you and your employees detect a breach that is ongoing or that happened in the past months or days?
Let’s examine whether your workforce has the ability to spot a breach and if they know what to do should one occur.
Common Causes of a Data Breach
Before we analyze whether you could identify a breach, let’s examine what the most common causes of a breach entail.
There are a wide variety of causes of a data breach. The most common include human error, the use of weak passwords, a lack of access controls to sensitive data, malware, phishing scams, and unpatched security flaws. Statistics tell us that these events are increasing at an alarming rate creating vulnerable openings for hackers or malicious software to enter your network and system.
Signs Of A Data Breach
According to a study published in Tech Target, more than 63% of breaches were discovered by external sources in 2022. That means that for a majority of cases, outside sources, rather than employees or business leaders, spotted the breach.
Are your employees able to spot that something isn’t quite right on your system or within your network? Here are a few signs that your workforce could be trained to identify.
- Error signs or warnings in browsers, anti-virus or anti-malware tools alerting you to infections that seem off
- Unscheduled changes to passwords or user access controls
- New or suspicious files in your system that are not encrypted
- Unexplainable loss of access to your network, social media, or email
- Suspicious transactions and access to files or banking information
- Unusually slow internet
- Intermittent network access
- Changes to critical infrastructure
Remediation After a Breach
While it would be great if your workforce had the capability to identify signs of a breach, it is equally important that they know what to do in the moments after a breach has occurred.
Remediation strategies should happen quickly after a breach has been discovered often by business leadership and your IT professionals. Steps that should be taken include isolating affected systems, disabling breached accounts or systems, restoring from backups, identifying and removing malware or other malicious software, and conducting forensic analysis to determine the extent and root cause of the breach.
Do you have a plan after a breach has occurred? Or would you like help training your workforce to spot the early signs of a breach in order to make remediation happen fast? Talk to our team at Spectra Networks about how you can be better prepared should this happen to your business.