A note from Andy Ellis
Every security team has its horror stories of bad things that’ve happened to them. If you’re fortunate, you can learn from other teams by listening to these stories. If you’re really clever, you can use those stories to run your own tabletop exercises, learn from them, and hopefully teach your team some lessons along the way.
YL Ventures is curating incidents for you to use as tabletop exercises. Some of these stories are true. Some have the rough edges filed off of them. But all of them are useful as the seeds of tabletop exercises for you. Each exercise has been posted on one of our portfolio company’s blogs, and they’ve responded with how their solution might help you in that scenario.
Looking for a tabletop exercise? Here’s one for you to use for your next annual exercise, whether it’s for PCI, SOC2, or just because you like practicing incident response.
Scenario: It’s a normal day, when you get the dreaded notification: some of your production data has leaked. Perhaps you learned about it after Brian Krebs called asking for a comment. Maybe the adversaries sent you a ransom note, or simply went ahead and published an excerpt of the data. Now you have to find out how it happened.
On analysis, you confirm that the data is legitimately yours. It matches active records in your production database. This isn’t a drill!
It’s time for forensics, and looking at your cloud audit trails reveals a surprise. When the cloud team went looking at access logs to the production database that seemed most likely to be the source of the data leak, they found…another datastore that was almost identical to the production system!
Apparently, last year, in order to test out a new data analytics platform, the analytics team had created a new environment. To populate this development environment, they cloned an existing data store, but didn’t bring over any of the access controls for it.
This is the datastore that was compromised. Without those access controls in place, an adversary who exploited what should have been a minor vulnerability was able to exfiltrate your crown jewels.
Eureka’s DSPM platform equips you with the capabilities you need to navigate this crisis with confidence. Let’s explore how, together, we can respond to and mitigate the fallout of this data breach scenario and safeguard against it happening again.
First, it’s critical to evaluate the extent of this breach’s impact. Eureka offers the tools needed to swiftly conduct a comprehensive impact assessment, easily meet compliance requirements and generate incident reports.
Moving beyond the initial assessment, Eureka can help you dive deeper into the forensic landscape to uncover hidden vulnerabilities and shed light on other potential breach vectors.
After a breach, understanding the residual impact and pinpointing additional compromised assets is crucial for uncovering hidden vulnerabilities and preventing further data loss or unauthorized access. Not only does this help uncover hidden vulnerabilities, it critically also prevents further data loss or unauthorized access. Swiftly identifying these assets enables organizations to carry out targeted remediation efforts, ensure regulatory compliance and reinforce trust with stakeholders through transparent and effective incident response.
Beyond assessing the immediate impact, you’ll want to delve into the broader ecosystem to identify interconnected assets that might be at risk. This involves scrutinizing data stores that share similar datasets or replicated without adequate security controls.
In the aftermath of a breach, time is of the essence to minimize its repercussions and prevent escalation. Proactive containment can limit further data exposure and enhance your ability to restore normalcy.
Let’s make sure this doesn’t happen again! Eureka enables the establishment of robust prevention measures and continuously monitors your data sprawl to fortify your defenses against future incidents.
Data breaches are undoubtedly stressful, but tackling them doesn’t have to be. What’s required are the right tools to initiate a swift response, thorough assessment, proactive mitigation and prevention measures. We built Eureka’s DSPM platform as a one-stop-shop to do just that with the granularity it takes to truly manage data security posture from end-to-end, and a unified place to see, understand and manage data access and usage, too. With Eureka, enterprises can finally regain total control over the data residing in their cloud while scaling data access and usage with complete confidence.
Through transparent incident response and continuous improvement facilitated by Eureka, you can emerge from a breach stronger, more resilient and better prepared to face future cybersecurity threats.