Data Breach Investigation
Investigating Unauthorised Access, Data Exposure and Potential Compromise.
Data Breach Investigation.
A data breach can involve unauthorised access to systems, accounts or information and may affect sensitive business, customer or employee data.
Understanding what happened can require investigation across endpoints, identities, networks, cloud environments, applications and other relevant evidence sources.
Key Incident Indicators
Alerts indicating unauthorised access to sensitive information
Unexpected exposure of customer, employee or business records
Suspicious login activity involving privileged or user accounts
Unusual database queries or bulk information extraction
Abnormal outbound network traffic or data transfers
Unauthorised access to cloud storage or business applications
Security alerts involving compromised credentials
Reports of organisational information appearing on external platforms
Unexplained changes to access permissions or security configurations
Key Challenges & Stellar Forensic Interventions
Identifying How the Breach Occurred
A data breach may originate from compromised credentials, malicious activity, exploited vulnerabilities, phishing, misconfiguration or other sources. Establishing the likely entry point requires examination of relevant technical evidence.
Determining What Was Accessed
Following a suspected breach, organisations may need to understand which systems, accounts, files or data were potentially accessed.
Establishing the Scope of the Breach
A compromise may extend across multiple users, devices, applications, environments or locations. Understanding the potential scope requires correlation of evidence from different sources.
Investigating Potential Data Exfiltration
Unauthorised access does not necessarily establish that information was transferred outside the environment. Where data movement is a concern, organisations may need to examine relevant evidence for indicators of staging, copying or transfer.
Supporting Response, Remediation and Recovery
Investigating the breach is only one part of the response. Organisations may also need to address affected systems, credentials, vulnerabilities and security controls.