Your team member leaks sensitive network information. How do you regain control and prevent future breaches?

To regain control after a team member leaks sensitive network information, we take decisive steps. Immediate Containment: Revoke access, secure compromised systems, and implement containment measures. Incident Response: Activate the incident response team to manage the breach and mitigate risks. Root Cause Analysis: Conduct a thorough analysis to identify vulnerabilities and the cause of the leak. Policy Reinforcement: Strengthen security protocols, enforce stricter access controls, and update team training. Disciplinary Action: Apply necessary disciplinary measures and enhance monitoring. Security Culture: Promote a strong culture of security awareness to prevent future breaches

I think you must take steps to contain the situation and move to understand why it happened. Once you have that, the most important thing is to make sure you have policy that addresses this issue. If so, you can make the team member aware of the policy and the ramifications of violating the policy. It would also be a good time to make other employees aware of the policy and get sign off that they have read and understand the policy.

It depends on the company policy. Seizing the laptop/desktop for evidence of the leakage and further investigation can be one option.

Once the leak is discovered l, containment is top priority. All Access rights of that team member must be revoked asap. Security authorities must be informed and a team must analyse how much damage can or have the leaked information cause. Other actions that should also take place are credentials change and a formal investigation why that member caused the leak

Contain the Breach: Immediately take steps to contain the breach. This includes restricting the affected systems and accounts, and stopping any ongoing data leaks. Notify Stakeholders: Inform relevant internal and external stakeholders about the breach as necessary. Ensure that communication is clear, accurate, and timely to manage the situation effectively. Secure Evidence: Preserve evidence of the breach for investigation and potential legal action. Document everything related to the incident, including how the information was leaked and any communications about it.

Strethening the defence is the most important aspect in preventing information leakage. 1)Do regular behaviour analytics 2) Conduct regular audits to check the effectiveness of the control 3) Regular Review privileged access and remove the unwanted access. 4) Time to time review the security breach policy and make it stringent. .

To strengthen defenses beyond the basics, consider implementing behavioral analytics to detect insider threats, adopting a zero-trust architecture to assume a breach and verify access, and employing threat hunting techniques to proactively identify threats. Regularly conduct incident response drills and prioritize supply chain security to ensure a robust and resilient security posture. By combining these advanced strategies with foundational security measures, you can significantly reduce the risk of future data breaches.

Security hardening that follows from the incident should be informed by the RCA. If, for example, it was caused a weak or breached password, then examine your MFA controls (along with your password policies). If you don't have MFA, implement. If there was MFA requirement but was bypassed by MFA fatigue, require MFA push with pin verification. Also, examine your MFA polices, monitoring and enforcement, as well as education. That specific example was for a breach caused by insecure IAM, but others would follow the same pattern. Say that a server was compromised due to insecure ports exposed to the internet (think RDP), then do a full FW review across your enterprise, tighten rules as necessary, review polices, etc. You get the idea.

Usually leaks happen by a leak standard access or by human failure. Invest in continuous access management e access polices review as well as training people is a important process a lot times forget.