Earlier this month, several news outlets reported that Australian National University’s (ANU) network was breached, allegedly by Chinese hackers. Although the official statement from ANU said that the threat was averted and no data was compromised, the breach serves as a warning to other organizations, especially with the new breach reporting law in Australia.
Australia’s Notifiable Data Breaches (NDB) scheme came into effect in February 2018 and requires Australian organizations that fall under the Privacy Act to report eligible data breaches to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC). The NDB scheme makes organizations more accountable for ensuring the security of the data they possess. In the OAIC’s first quarterly report this year, they received 63 data breach notifications during the first six weeks after the NDB’s implementation.
While many Australian organizations revamped their security defenses to prepare for the Privacy Act’s NBD amendment, it’s important to understand that security systems in all organizations must be continuously evaluated, tested, and strengthened. An area we recommend focusing on is incident detection and response. Your security team must be in a position to instantly flag suspicious activity in your network and efficiently take steps to mitigate an attack.
One way to get there is by enabling auditing on your systems to track the occurrence of important security events. Then, you should leverage a security information and event management (SIEM) solution to effectively analyze the audit information. Doing so allows you to periodically review activity in your network by running audit reports and receive alerts for indicators of compromise (IOCs). Even for worst case scenarios, like discovering a breach weeks or months after it happened, a SIEM solution can help. With a SIEM solution, you’ll be able to conduct forensic investigations using the audit trail, and gather crucial details about the impact of a breach—which is a must for reporting data breaches to authorities.
Download our free e-book to learn how you can leverage a SIEM solution like ManageEngine Log360 to protect your data and enable critical security measures for the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme.
