Effective Incident Response Strategies for Managing Sensitive Data Incidents

In 2009, MIT's Data Incident Response Team (DIRT) experienced a surge of reports of suspected sensitive data exposure incidents. As awareness of the new Massachusetts Data Breach Notification Law grew so did adoption and use of discovery tools such as Identity Finder within the enterprise. To deal more effectively with this increase, DIRT established more detailed procedures for reporting cases to DIRT with one large department having a concentration of sensitive data. These methods enable the department to confirm the presence or establish the scope of sensitive data in a manner not disruptive to subsequent forensic examination.