What to Do When Your Security is Breached

ancientribe writes "When you've got a full-blown security breach on your hands, what do you do? If you've been smart, you'll already have a computer security incident response team — and a plan — in place. But many companies are too resource-strapped to have a full-blown, fully-tested incident response strategy. DarkReading has some tips on what to do — and what not to do."

Comments

Re:Anyone ever followup with law enforcement agenc

[mandelbr0t]

I've considered it, but there's a lot of barriers. First, you need enough evidence for a subpoena. That means that the chain of custody has to be preserved, and the crime scene needs to be secured by the police. Usually that means giving the compromised machines, relevant logs from monitoring equipment, etc. over to Law Enforcement for an indeterminate amount of time. I know I can't live without my servers for that long.

You need to get the subpoena to identify the person behind the attack. That assumes that your evidence actually points to a specific suspect. Unless your attacker was a complete moron, or your network logs are incredibly voluminous, that's not very likely. Once the subpoena is served and you've got your suspect and laid charges, you need to present evidence. That requires an expert witness. If you're lucky, YOU are the expert witness, but there's training and certification involved in that process. Otherwise, you get to hire an expert witness, and that won't be cheap. Your opponent will probably hire an opposing expert, just to confuse everybody.

Overall, I'd say that chances of success are incredibly low. Legal fees will be very high, and you have to turn over a fair chunk of your network assets to Law Enforcement. Basically, if you aren't really, really sure that you've got your man, it's really not worth the time and effort to find out who it was. That effort is much better spent allowing you to sleep at night knowing that people aren't getting in, IMO.