SpartanTec, Inc. Fayetteville: What’s the Difference Between a Data Breach and Security Incident?

If you think a data breach can’t happen to you, think again: According to the Ponemon Institute’s Fifth Annual Benchmark Study on Privacy and Security of Healthcare Data, criminal attacks are up 125 percent compared to five years ago. And that’s just in the healthcare sector. Now more than ever, organizations need a primer on how to protect sensitive data. With cybercrime attacks on the rise, it’s critical to understand what a data breach is, how it differs from a security incident and how to plan a data breach response.

Incident vs. Data Breach

Think of a security incident as a pesky cold that may sideline you for a couple days, but clears up fairly quickly. It’s any event that violates an organization’s security or privacy policies around sensitive information like Social Security numbers or confidential medical records. This can be anything from a misplaced drive to missing paper files. A data breach, on the other hand, is like the nastiest flu bug ever — a whopper of a virus that will knock you off your feet. The folks at ID Experts define it as a security incident that meets specific legal definitions per state and federal laws. Specifically, data breaches require notification to the affected individuals, regulatory agencies, and sometimes credit reporting agencies and media.

Security Incidents Are Status Quo

Security incidents are, sadly, part of the status quo — with 65 percent of healthcare organizations reporting having experienced electronic information-based security incidents over the past two years, according to the Ponemon study. While not all cybersecurity incidents escalate into data breaches, there’s a regulatory obligation to complete an incident risk assessment when PHI (protected health information) or PII (personally identifiable information) is compromised.

Responding Effectively

When an incident does escalate into a data breach, a quick and effective response is critical. This requires close collaboration across the company or organization, not just IT security. Stakeholders in legal, marketing, public relations, the C-Suite and other functions have to be prepared to own a piece of the incident response and work together in a fairly seamless manner.

The first two, vital steps following a data breach are 1) Quantify the damage; and 2) Determine your response. To address the first, quantifying damage, it helps to know at any point in time what information requires the most protection, where it’s stored and how it’s protected. At SpartanTec, Inc. in Fayetteville NC we recommend performing periodic cyber threat assessments to develop this understanding for:

managing enterprise risk
quell fears, especially when the breach is more serious than initially thought
credit monitoring isn’t enough
media interest is high.
It requires data breach agility.

Organizations with high data breach agility are more likely to have cybersecurity platforms that optimize visibility and the sharing of actionable threat intelligence between prevention and detection tools and across endpoints, data centers and the cloud.

This is one of the advantages of the security fabric. Based on open APIs, it links together different security sensors and tools to collect real threat data, enabling technology and people to more effectively coordinate and respond to potential threats.