Scenario & Impact
Threat actors may be exploiting weak rate-limiting and CAPTCHA enforcement on a platform’s resume search functionality.
Imagine a scenario where a job platform experiences a data breach, resulting in the exposure of thousands of job seekers’ personal information. Over several days, a bot systematically harvests thousands of candidate profiles, including names, contact information, job history, and education, which is later sold on underground forums and used in phishing scams. The breach is discovered when the stolen data appears on underground forums and is used in targeted phishing scams.
This impact platforms’ credibility & business in the following ways: –
- Loss of User Trust: Job seekers trust platforms to safeguard their personal information, but a data breach shatters this trust, and they are likely to abandon the platform in favor of more secure alternatives, thereby declining the user base.
- Reputation Damage: News of the data breach and social media backlash can damage the platform’s reputation, putting the platform at a competitive disadvantage, making it harder to attract new users and business partners.
- Legal and Regulatory Consequences: Data breaches can trigger inquiries from data protection authorities and necessitate breach notifications under laws such as the Digital Personal Data Protection (DPDP) Act or equivalent regulations, and non-compliance with it could result in hefty penalties
Mitigation Strategies
- Strengthening Data Security:
- Encrypt personal data both in transit and at rest to protect it from unauthorized access.
- Implement strict access controls to ensure only authorized personnel can access sensitive data.
- Conduct regular security audits to identify and fix vulnerabilities.
- Enhancing User Trust & Publish Privacy Policy to showcase the company’s practice in data handling:
- Be transparent with users about their data and keep them updated on security measures.
- Educate users about protecting their personal information online, like recognizing phishing attempts and using strong passwords.
- Compliance and Legal Preparedness:
- Develop and implement clear protocols for breach notification, including immediate notification to affected individuals and authorities.
- Prepare detailed reports on the breach, as well as mitigation measures taken.
- Provide regular training for employees on data protection laws and breach response procedures.
In case of any incident, there should be immediate action & communication, comprising detection and Identification by monitoring unusual activity, and confirming the incident, followed by containment & isolating the affected systems to prevent further data harvesting.
Post this, there should be eradication in which there will be removal of malicious code and unauthorized access points & further recovery by restoring clean backups with security protocols.
At last, there should be a post-incident review to analyze the incident to understand what happened, how it happened, and why it happened.
There should be defined roles in the organization to handle such incidents, such as incident manager, technical lead, communication manager, and customer support lead, who can ensure the issue at hand is dealt efficiently.
There should also be the right communication strategy to address security incidents to respective stakeholders, like a predefined communication plan on how to address communication during such incidents.
Provide regular updates, be transparent, and ensure consistency. Post-Incident, there should be a debriefing session and gather feedback to improve future communication strategies.
The entire exercise should be on Remediation & Future Prevention, followed by root cause analysis, and gathering data of the incident & analyzing it, and implementing effective solutions to mitigate such incidents in the future.
