As a kid, keeping a secret meant not telling anyone else information that a friend chose to share with you and trusted you to protect. In the digital era, protecting customer and employee sensitive data works similarly. Although establishing privacy controls and maintaining data protection are more difficult when managing complex IT environments, the principles underlying your data protection initiatives remain the same.

When you engage in a security incident investigation, you need to quickly sift through vast quantities of data. In that moment, tracking your attacker, containing the attack, and identifying the root cause are the activities that matter most. However, in an attack’s aftermath, the digital recovery process and post-incident paperwork becomes your new nightmare.

You’ve probably heard the Boy Scout motto, “be prepared.” In his 1908 handbook, Scouting for Boys, the author explained, “it shows you how you must be prepared for what is possible, not only what is probable.” Your cyber incident response plan is how you prepare for a possible, and, also in today’s world, probable security incident or data breach. Unfortunately, since every organization is different, no single plan will work for everyone.

Over twenty years ago, a series of corporate financial scandals set off a chain reaction, culminating in criminal convictions and new legislation. After uncovering accounting fraud across public companies like Enron, WorldCom, and Tyco, the US Congress enacted the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002 (SOX).

Investigating a security event is the less glamorous version of an episode of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. Without the snazzy, high-end, mostly-fictitious technology that television shows you, your actual digital forensics investigation usually involves an arduous process of reviewing technical data and looking for the breadcrumbs a malicious actor left behind.