Data breach notification software is an essential tool for businesses looking to manage and respond in a timely manner to security incidents involving the loss or unauthorized disclosure of sensitive data. By automating the process of identifying, evaluating, and addressing breaches, data breach notification solutions can help protect an organization’s reputation, reduce its liability, and maintain compliance with laws and regulations governing data privacy. Furthermore, they can facilitate communication among stakeholders and minimize the potential impact of a breach on customers and users through early detection and rapid response.
A data breach is a security violation one in which sensitive, confidential, or protected information is stolen, transmitted, copied, altered, viewed, or utilized by unauthorized individuals. Data breaches are on the rise – with a 15% increase over the last three years which brought the global average cost of a data breach up to USD 4.45 million in 2023 – so it is vital that organizations take steps to mitigate the risks involved.
With a variety of data breach notification software available on the market, it’s important to choose a solution that meets your organization’s specific needs and integrates seamlessly with your existing security infrastructure. In this guide, we will explore the top 7 data breach notification software solutions on the market today.
We will evaluate these solutions based on their features, ease of use, third-party integrations, and customization options. When choosing the right data breach notification software for your organization, you should also keep your organization’s size, industry, and data protection requirements in mind.
ESET Inspect is a cloud-delivered, extended detection and response (XDR) solution that is part of the ESET PROTECT platform. ESET Inspect uses behavior and reputation-based detection, powered by the global ESET LiveGrid reputation system, to effectively alert teams to anomalous behavior and data breaches in real-time feedback with investigation and remediation capabilities.
ESET Inspect enhances system visibility for risk managers and incident responders, enabling them to conduct in-depth root cause analysis and respond to incidents quickly. ESET Inspect, paired with the prevention power of ESET Endpoint Protection products, supports Windows, macOS, and Linux, making it an ideal choice for multiplatform environments.
This solution features a Public REST API, allowing integration with tools such as SIEM, SOAR, and ticketing systems. It also references MITRE Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK™) framework for comprehensive threat information. ESET Inspect can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud, offering options for organizations to tailor their setup based on TCO targets and hardware capacity.
This solution also has a customizable Learning Mode to ease the setup process and map environments with desired interaction and data storage levels. The solution also boasts extensive filtering to reduce false positives and allow security teams to focus on actual threats.
Fortinet offers a portfolio of over 50 integrated enterprise-grade products to help secure people, devices, and data, trusted by more than 680,000 customers worldwide. One of Fortinet’s key offerings, the FortiGuard Incident Response Services, providing vital expert support before, during, and after a security incident or data breach.
FortiGuard provides fast data breach detection, investigation, containment, and return to safe operation.
FortiGuard’s experts help organizations to o determine the attacker’s entry point, presence, network footprint, access level, and necessary actions for scope, containment, eradication, and repair. The service is equipped to handle compromises such as ransomware attacks, business email compromise (BEC), advanced persistent threats (APTs), and web application attacks, among others.
FortiGuard Labs experts bring decades of investigatory and response experience, utilizing powerful investigation technologies, unique defuse capabilities, robust threat intelligence, and established procedures and processes. These seasoned threat hunters and incident responders play an invaluable role in assisting security teams in maintaining a secure network and dealing with potential threats.
Microsoft Defender for Cloud is a cloud-native application protection platform (CNAPP) designed to detect and respond to attacks and data breaches in real time, safeguarding multicloud, hybrid, and on-premises workloads. It offers comprehensive cloud workload protection, enabling users to discover vulnerabilities, uncover threats, and automate their response centrally within the Defender for Cloud platform.
The platform helps defend various layers of multicloud and on-premises environments like servers, databases, containers, storage, APIs, and service layers. It enables real-time threat response, with a centralized view and correlated alerts that can integrate with existing security information and event management (SIEM) systems. Microsoft Defender for Cloud helps reduce the attack surface by identifying and remediating vulnerabilities before they can be exploited while automatically protecting new workloads as soon as they are deployed. Microsoft Defender for Cloud also accelerates investigations, staying ahead of cross-platform attacks using connected investigation and threat hunting, while integrating with Microsoft 365 Defender and Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence.
The platform is compatible with a wide range of workload types across Microsoft Azure, AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and on-premises environments, allowing for comprehensive protection across various cloud infrastructures.
Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention ensures protection without compromising performance by guarding networks from known threats such as exploits, malware, spyware, and command and control attacks with market-leading researcher-grade signatures which may lead to data breach. Advanced Threat Prevention provides industry-leading prevention with accuracy by blocking threats at the network and application layers and maintaining a low tolerance for false positives.
Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention provides excellent prevention of known threats but can also accurately and effectively block previously unseen exploit attempts and command and control attacks. This solution boasts comprehensive coverage of Command and Control (C2) attacks by blocking unknown C2 attacks and exploit attempts in real-time using purpose-built inline deep learning models. Users can achieve complete visibility of all threats by leveraging User-ID™, App-ID™, and Device-ID™ technology on ML-Powered NGFWs, maintaining consistent oversight on all traffic, regardless of the techniques attackers use.
Palo Alto Networks Advanced Threat Prevention safeguards organizations with industry-first preventions, providing multiple layers of defense during each phase of an attack, leveraging deep and machine learning models to block evasive and unknown C2, and stopping zero-day exploit attempts inline.
Trellix provide an integrated suite of data security services, empowering enterprises to discover, monitor, and protect sensitive data while centralizing management and reporting Their DLP solution includes powerful reporting, policy enforcement with deep forensics, fast remediation to safeguard vital data, and improved control with user behavior tracking.
This solution uses more than 300 content types to classify data, with methods such as automatic fingerprinting, exact data match, integration with external classification tools, and manual classification. The company also provides customizable actions that inform users when policy violations or data breaches occur, allowing them to provide a reason for the violation while logging the incident.
Trellix DLP continuously scans all accessible resources to detect and report policy violations across data at rest, data in use, and data in motion throughout the entire network. Real-time scanning, tracking, and reporting ensure that businesses have confidence in the protection of their sensitive data.
Trend Micro, a global leader in cybersecurity, offers a platform that delivers improved threat detection and response by providing central visibility across environments like AWS, Microsoft, and Google. Trend Micro Deep Discovery Inspector, is designed to monitor all network ports and over 105 different protocols, providing 360-degree visibility of both east-west and north-south traffic with a single appliance to detect data breaches.
One unique feature of Deep Discovery Inspector is its custom sandboxing capabilities. This approach uses virtual images that match various operating system configurations, drivers, installed applications, and language versions, making it more difficult for hackers to evade detection. The solution effectively analyzes multi-stage downloads, URLs, command-and-control, and more in its “safe live mode”. Trend Micro’s Vision One allows users to correlate advanced threat events and prioritize response efforts. This feature enables visualization of the attack life cycle at the network layer, including managed and unmanaged devices such as contractor and third-party systems, IoT and IIoT devices, printers, and BYOD systems.
Overall, Trend Micro Deep Discovery Inspector is a comprehensive security solution for organizations seeking enhanced visibility and protection in today’s digital landscape.
Everything You Need To Know About Data Breach Alerting Software (FAQs)
What is Data Breach Alerting Software?
Data breach notification software supports organizations in properly documenting data breaches or security alerts. This aids in reporting to supervisory authorities as required by laws and regulations, and ensuring any impacted individuals are alerted to their involvement. These solutions save a lot of time and energy by automating and operationalizing the data breach notification process, which makes it significantly more streamlined, less disruptive, and in better adherence with data disclosing laws and timelines.
What Are The Benefits Of Using Data Breach Alerting Software?
Data breach notification software is a very useful tool that can help organizations to respond to and manage data breaches more effectively. Some specific benefits of implementing this technology at your organization include:
- Ensuring compliance regulations are met. There are stringent laws and regulations organizations may be required to follow, depending on their regions and countries, and many of these regulation will require the prompt notification of affected individuals and regulatory authorities if a breach does take place. There are often steep fines and legal consequences for failing to comply with these regulations, so data breach notification software is useful as it supports adherence with these legal obligations.
- Avoiding financial loss. Data breaches can lead to significant financial loss due to lost business opportunities if customers’ trust is affected due to their information being stolen, as well as via regulatory fines, legal penalties, and legal settlements. A good data breach notification solution can help avoid this financial loss by mitigating the risk of these negative outcomes occurring.
- Minimizing reputational damage and loss of customer confidence. A badly handled breach can negatively impact an organization’s reputation for years, and lead to their customers losing confidence in their professional ability to keep the important data in their care safe. Tools like data breach notification software facilitate better transparency and communication, which helps to ensure that affected parties and both long-term and prospective customers are not put off from working with your organization in the future.
Essentially, data breach notification software works to support organizations in fulfilling their legal obligations, protecting the privacy of any individuals affected by attacks, managing their reporting, and minimizing the risk of significant financial loss and damage to their reputation. These solutions are a highly useful tool for mitigating these risks, and can contribute overall to the maintaining of comprehensive cybersecurity and a good data protection strategy.
What Features Should You Look For In Data Breach Alerting Software?
To support organizations in properly handling breaches, data breach notification software provides a number of useful features. These include:
- Incident detection. Any data breach notification software you consider should be able to automatically and continually monitor various data sources and network traffic for any indication of suspicious activity or successful breaches. This might include things like intrusion detection systems, anomaly detection algorithms, and security event logs, which work together to identify incidents based on predefined criteria and security event monitoring.
- Alerting. Alongside the need for incident detection is of course the need to quickly and efficiently alert users when an incident is identified. Data breach notification software should be capable of sending alerts immediately to individuals and teams (like IT security personnel, legal teams, incident response teams, management etc.) when a breach is detected. These alerts may come via emails, SMS, or other communication channels.
- Incident classification. These solutions enable incident classification for this purpose, automatically classifying the nature and severity of an incident based on predefined criteria. This classification makes it easier to determine the appropriate response.
- Data inventory and impact assessment. A core capability of data breach notification software is the ability to maintain an accurate inventory of sensitive data and correctly identify any data that has been compromised or exposed. The software might also perform an impact assessment to get a comprehensive look at the harm caused by the breach as well as any regulatory implications.
- Response planning. Data breach notification software provides tools that work to create and document incident response plans. It is important to not only take steps to prevent breaches from occurring or to mitigate their damage, organizations must also be able to appropriately respond to breaches. The plans these tools create outline specific steps and actions that should be made in response to different forms of breaches, and may also include predefined workflows and tasks.
- Reporting. A good data breach notification software solution will provide reporting and documentation capabilities, meaning that detailed reports can be easily generated in order to meet regulatory compliance requirements and conduct internal reviews. This includes breach documentation, response timelines, remediation efforts, and communication logs.
- Analysis. In order to improve security in the future these tools will typically provide post-incident analysis after the breach has been entirely contained and mitigated, which allows users to identify the vulnerabilities and weaknesses that led to the breach and begin to plan for changes that could improve weak areas in the organization’s security posture.
