Cybersecurity For Dummies

Chapter 11

Identifying a Security Breach

IN THIS CHAPTER

Understanding why it’s critical to know if you were breached

Identifying overt and covert breaches

Recognizing various symptoms of covert breaches

Despite valiant efforts to protect your computer systems and data, you may suffer some sort of breach. In fact, the odds that your data will — at some point — be breached are close to 100 percent. The only real question is whether the breach will take place on your system or on someone else’s.

Because you’re ultimately responsible for maintaining your own computer systems, you need to be able to recognize the signs of a potential breach of your equipment. If a hacker does manage to penetrate your systems, you need to terminate his or her access as quickly as possible. If your data has been manipulated or destroyed, you need to restore an accurate copy. If systems are malfunctioning, you need to get them back on track.

In this chapter, you discover the symptoms of a breach. Armed with this knowledge, you can hopefully recognize if something is amiss and know the corrective actions to take.

If you’ve already receive notification from a third-party-provider where you store data ...