TL;DR
Yes, many services can detect data breaches. These range from free tools for basic monitoring to paid solutions offering comprehensive protection and incident response. This guide covers options for different needs and budgets.
Detecting Data Breaches: A Step-by-Step Guide
- Understand What You Need To Protect
- Identify sensitive data (customer details, financial records, intellectual property).
- Know where this data is stored – servers, cloud services, laptops, databases.
- Determine your risk tolerance and regulatory requirements (e.g., GDPR).
- Have I Been Pwned? (HIBP): Check if email addresses have appeared in known data breaches.
https://haveibeenpwned.com/ - Google Alerts: Set up alerts for your company name, key personnel names, and potentially leaked data points.
- Dark Web Forums Monitoring (Manual): This is time-consuming but can reveal early signs of compromised credentials. Requires technical expertise.
Note: Manual dark web monitoring requires caution due to the nature of these forums.
- Dark Web Monitoring Services: These scan dark web marketplaces and forums for your company’s data.
- Examples: Digital Shadows, Constella Intelligence, ZeroFox.
- Cost: Typically subscription-based, ranging from a few hundred to thousands of pounds per year depending on the scope.
- Compromised Credential Monitoring: Alerts you when your employees’ usernames and passwords appear in leaked databases.
- Examples: Have I Been Pwned Enterprise, BreachWatch.
- Cost: Per-user subscription model.
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) Systems: Collect logs from various sources to identify suspicious activity.
- Examples: Splunk, Sumo Logic, Azure Sentinel.
- Cost: Can be expensive, requiring significant setup and maintenance. Often used by larger organisations.
- Example SIEM Alert Rule (Splunk): Detect multiple failed login attempts from the same IP address.
index=main sourcetype=auth Failed login count > 5 | stats count by user, ip | where count > 5
- Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Services: Outsource your cyber security monitoring to a specialist provider.
- Examples: Red Canary, CrowdStrike Falcon Complete.
- Cost: Subscription-based, offering 24/7 monitoring and incident response.
- Prevent sensitive data from leaving your organisation.
- Examples: Forcepoint DLP, Symantec DLP.
- Cost: Subscription-based, often integrated with other security solutions.
- Identify weaknesses in your systems before attackers do.
- Tools: Nessus, OpenVAS (free), Burp Suite.
- Cost: Varies depending on the scope of testing.
- Have a plan in place for what to do if a breach occurs.
- Document procedures for containment, eradication, recovery, and notification.
- Regularly test your plan with tabletop exercises.