Data Leaks For Dummies®

Chapter 24. In the Event of Data Loss

In This Chapter

• Creating a plan to prevent a panic

• Dealing with the press and media

• Developing an ongoing project

• Supporting your customers through a data-loss incident

• Ensuring that it won't happen again

	"It won't happen to me."
	--Government official

	"Are you kidding? It'll never happen to me."
	--CIO, Large Manufacturer, Inc.

	"It's really unlikely. It sure won't happen to me."
	--CEO, Household Name Bank

	"What just happened?"
	--Too many of us, when it happens anyway

So... you've secured your IT environment, or at least you thought you did, and then one morning you get a call...

Sometimes a data breach is pretty difficult to spot — especially where it involves the bad guys stealing data for subversive purposes. They don't want to be caught, so they hide the crime. (After all, you don't get your average cat burglar ripping off a house and then marching up to the nearest policeman to say, "Guess what I just did?") So sometimes it can be pretty tricky to spot that a breach has happened, and it can take considerable time to realize that it has happened at all.

Of course, some cases show up on the radar right away. Say your sales director has left his laptop in the back of his car and it's been stolen... so one morning you get a call... Yikes. According to the sales director, it wasn't his fault. He'd even left the laptop out of sight in the trunk, but the car was broken into, and the laptop went away. What will you do? In the immortal words of The Hitchhiker's ...