Dark Web Threat Intelligence: What It Is & How to Use It
Dark Web Monitoring Threat Intelligence
What Is Dark Web Threat Intelligence? Your employees’ credentials are probably for sale right now. The question is …
Learn how to build a data breach response plan that reduces costs and speeds up recovery.
• A data breach response plan defines what your team does before, during, and after a breach
• Speed determines cost. Containing a breach within 200 days saves over a million dollars
• Most companies skip testing their plan, then discover gaps during an actual breach
• Credential monitoring catches exposed passwords early, giving your response team time to reset them before attackers exploit them
Most data breach response plans collect dust until something goes wrong. By then, it’s too late to figure out who does what.
According to IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report, 65% of breached companies are still recovering from the incident. And 76% of the companies that did recover took more than 100 days to get there.
The difference between a fast recovery and a slow one comes down to preparation. Companies with a tested response plan contain breaches faster and pay far less in damages.
Here’s how to build a data breach response plan that actually works when you need it.
Contents
What Is a Data Breach Response Plan?
Every company has data worth stealing. Not every company knows what to do when it happens.
A data breach response plan is a documented playbook that defines exactly what your team does before, during, and after a data breach. It covers who’s responsible and how to contain the damage. It also specifies when to notify affected parties and how to prevent a repeat incident.
A good data breach response plan covers three phases. Before a breach, it defines roles and processes. During a breach, it tells your team exactly what to do and in what order. After a breach, it guides recovery and ensures you learn from what happened.
Without one, your team wastes critical hours figuring out the basics while the breach gets worse.
Why Does Your Company Need a Data Breach Response Plan?
The short answer: breaches are expensive, and slow responses make them worse.
According to IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report, the global average cost of a data breach is $4.44 million. In the United States, that number jumps to $10.22 million, a record high.
But cost isn’t the only problem. 86% of breaches caused real operational downtime. That means systems down and teams scrambling. Customers can’t access services. On top of that, 32% of breaches resulted in regulatory fines.
Your response time directly affects how much you pay. Breaches identified and contained in under 200 days cost $3.87 million on average. Breaches that took longer cost $5.01 million. That’s a $1.14 million difference based purely on speed.
Then there’s the compliance angle. GDPR requires notification within 72 hours. Most US states have their own breach notification laws with specific timelines. Without a plan, you risk missing those deadlines and stacking fines on top of recovery costs.
A data breach response plan isn’t optional. It’s how you control the damage.
What Should a Data Breach Response Plan Include?
Your data breach response plan needs seven core components. Skip any of them and you’ll have gaps when it matters most.
1. Response Team Roles
Define who does what before anything happens. Your response team needs an incident response lead to coordinate the effort and an IT security team to investigate and contain. Legal and compliance staff handle notifications. A communications lead manages public messaging. An executive sponsor makes the hard calls fast.
Every person needs to know their role. Keep contact information updated and accessible even if your network is down. Print backup copies. Attackers don’t wait for you to look up phone numbers.
2. Risk Assessment
You can’t protect what you don’t know about. Start by identifying what data you hold and where it lives. Classify it by sensitivity. Customer payment data and employee credentials need more protection than your company blog content.
Map out realistic threat scenarios based on your environment. If you’re a healthcare company, patient records are your biggest target. If you’re a SaaS company, it’s customer databases and API keys. Your data breach response plan should focus on the threats that actually apply to you.
3. Detection and Identification
This is where most companies fall behind. According to IBM’s 2025 data, the average time to identify and contain a breach is 241 days. That’s almost eight months.
The good news is that detection is improving. Internal security teams now catch 50% of breaches themselves, up from 33% in 2023. But that still means half of all breaches are discovered by someone else, whether that’s a customer complaint or a law enforcement notification. Sometimes the attackers themselves disclose it.
Your plan should define how you’ll detect breaches across multiple channels. Internal monitoring tools and third-party alerts are the baseline. Dark web monitoring for leaked credentials adds early warning. The faster you detect, the less it costs.
4. Containment and Eradication
Once you confirm a breach, containment comes first. Isolate affected systems to stop the spread. This might mean disconnecting servers from the network or revoking compromised credentials. Sometimes you need to shut down specific services entirely.
While you contain the breach, preserve forensic evidence. Don’t wipe or rebuild systems until your investigation team has what they need. You’ll want to know exactly how the attacker got in and what they accessed. Check for backdoors they may have planted for future access.
After containment, eradicate the threat. Patch the vulnerability that allowed entry. Reset all compromised credentials across every system where they were used. If infostealer malware was involved, check for stolen session tokens that are still valid as well.
5. Notification Procedures
Most jurisdictions require you to notify affected individuals and regulators within a specific timeframe. Your plan should include templates for different audiences. Customers and employees need different messaging than regulators do.
Define your communication chain. Who approves notifications? Who sends them? What channels do you use? Have templates pre-written and pre-approved by legal so you’re not drafting press releases at 2 AM during a crisis.
Be honest in your notifications. Explain what happened and what data was involved. Tell people what steps they should take to protect themselves. Vague notifications erode trust faster than the breach itself.
6. Recovery and Remediation
Recovery takes longer than most companies expect. IBM’s 2025 report shows that 76% of recovered companies took more than 100 days to fully restore operations.
Start by restoring from clean backups. Validate data integrity before bringing systems back online. Reset exposed credentials across all systems, not just the ones directly affected by the breach.
Document everything during the recovery process. What you restore and when you restore it. Note any anomalies. This record becomes critical for the post-incident review and any regulatory inquiries.
7. Post-Incident Review
After the dust settles, review what happened and what worked. What was the initial attack vector? How long did detection take? Where did the response plan hold up, and where did it break down?
Update the plan based on what you learned. Then schedule tabletop exercises to practice the updated procedures. Companies that review and iterate build stronger defenses over time. Companies that skip this step repeat the same mistakes.
What Are the Most Common Attack Vectors That Trigger a Data Breach Response?
Knowing what you’re most likely to face helps you prepare. IBM’s 2025 report breaks down the most common and most expensive initial attack vectors.
Phishing is the most common vector, responsible for 16% of breaches with an average cost of $4.80 million per incident.
Supply chain compromises are second at 15%, and they’re the most expensive at $4.91 million average cost. They also take the longest to resolve at 267 days. When your vendor gets breached, their problem becomes your problem.
Compromised credentials remain a major vector, costing $4.67 million on average and taking 246 days to resolve. Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found that stolen credentials were involved in 88% of web application breaches. Stolen passwords from breaches and stealer logs give attackers direct access to your systems.
Malicious insiders cause the most expensive breaches at $4.92 million average, though they’re less common than external attacks.
The pattern is clear: credentials are at the center of the most common and costly breaches. Monitoring for compromised credentials early is one of the most direct ways to prevent a full-blown incident.
How Do You Test and Maintain Your Data Breach Response Plan?
A plan that sits in a drawer is worthless. Regular testing is the only way to know if your data breach response plan actually works.
Tabletop exercises are the minimum. Gather your response team quarterly and walk through a simulated breach scenario. Talk through each step. You’ll find gaps fast when people realize they don’t know who to call or what system to check first.
Full breach simulations should happen at least annually. These go beyond talking through scenarios. Simulate actual system compromises and test whether your team can detect and contain the breach within your defined timelines.
Keep the plan current. Update contact lists when people change roles. Revise procedures when you add new infrastructure or onboard new vendors. Review regulatory requirements when you expand to new markets. A plan written for last year’s environment won’t work for today’s threats.
Integrate new threat intelligence. Attack methods change constantly. Keep up by monitoring for new attack techniques and tracking which of your credentials have been exposed.
How Does Early Breach Detection Strengthen Your Data Breach Response?
Your data breach response plan is only as good as your detection speed. The 241-day average lifecycle that IBM reports isn’t just a statistic. It’s the gap between when a breach happens and when you can actually do something about it.
Every day in that gap adds cost. The faster you contain the breach, the less you pay. The math is straightforward.
Dark web monitoring is the process of continuously scanning criminal marketplaces and stealer log channels for your company’s exposed credentials. When your passwords or session tokens appear in a new breach or leak, you get an alert immediately instead of finding out months later.
This is where credential monitoring changes the equation. Instead of waiting for an attacker to use stolen credentials against you, you find out the moment they’re exposed. That early warning lets you trigger your data breach response plan before the real damage starts. Reset passwords and kill any active sessions immediately.
If you want to see what’s already exposed, check your dark web exposure now. For continuous monitoring and real-time alerts when your credentials appear in breaches and stealer logs, book a demo to see how Breachsense works.
Data Breach Response Plan FAQ
At minimum quarterly through tabletop exercises. Run full breach simulations annually. Update the plan whenever your infrastructure changes or you onboard new vendors. Also revisit it after any real incident. A plan that hasn’t been tested is a plan that won’t work.
An incident response plan covers all security incidents including malware and DDoS attacks. A data breach response plan specifically focuses on incidents where personal or sensitive data is exposed. It includes additional notification and compliance requirements that general incident response plans don’t cover, plus customer communication obligations.
The CISO or head of security typically owns it, but the plan requires cross-functional buy-in. Legal and communications need defined roles. So do HR and executive leadership. The plan fails if only the security team knows it exists.
Dark web monitoring detects leaked credentials before attackers exploit them. Instead of finding out about a breach months later through customer complaints, you can trigger your response plan within hours of exposure.
The global average is $4.44 million according to IBM’s 2025 report. In the US, it’s $10.22 million. But the real variable is speed. Fast containment saves money. Breaches resolved within 200 days cost $3.87 million versus $5.01 million for slower responses.
Contain the breach immediately. Isolate affected systems to stop the spread. Then preserve forensic evidence before wiping anything. Your first priority is stopping the bleeding, not figuring out who’s to blame.
