Seth Darmstadter, Attorney – Commercial Disputes, K&L Gates; and Jibran Ilyas, Assistant Director – Incident Response, Stroz Friedberg, provide a strategic approach towards the management and mitigation of cyber security and data breaches within large companies. With reference to the fact that an average breach causes losses worth $6.5 million to a firm, Seth and Jibran state that data breaches are causing an increasing worry to entrepreneurs, tech firms, and individuals too.
Some of our key takeaways from the conversation:
- Advance Threats Don’t Give a Warning Signal:
Receiving a threat in your system is more benign than getting breached without warning. Attackers test each malware across 40 different antivirus software, send personalized emails, and even strategically place malware on the sites that a user is bound to visit. - Understand and Identify the Risk Factors:
An entrepreneur should know the kind of threats his business is likely to experience, and should ideally have an incident response team in place. Growing tech companies should specifically be careful of employees hacking into their systems. - Outer Perspectives Matter:
In addition to an in-house team, a company should also have an incident response (IR) team in place. This ensures an expert approach towards a data breach. The first 24 hours after the breach are most important, and an IR team has a plan in place to follow after a data breach.
Below are some of the key points and moments from the conversation:
- 0:07 – Seth and Jibran introduced themselves and explained briefly about cyber security and data breaches
- 3:15 – Data breaches are becoming rampant among banks and large firms by individual hackers, as well as terrorists
- 3:56 – Cyber threats have evolved from bragging experimentalism and online vandalism to large-scale cyber crimes and hacks from a nation state, and are considered more serious than an individual hacker
- 8:13 – Advanced persistent threats have a cutting-edge approach to extract information and drop malware
- 11:58 – Employees hacking into a firm’s data is a rising concern and tech companies need to put an effective incident response program in place
- 15:25 – The first 24 hours of a security breach are the most critical. “Don’t panic… don’t veer off your plan,” and “don’t remediate without expert advice”
- 20:14 – An incident response plan is needed to understand a firm’s network, data flow, and how to remediate a breach
- 22:49 – Seth emphasized on having a cyber insurance review in place
