Data Breach Investigation and Response Questions

Covers the end to end handling of a data breach with emphasis on privacy, legal and regulatory obligations, and practical incident response skills. Topics include detection and triage, determining scope and impact such as affected systems, data types, number of individuals, and exposure duration, and preserving evidence while protecting privacy and legal privilege through proper chain of custody and log preservation. Candidates should be able to coordinate cross functional stakeholders including information technology, security, legal, privacy, communications, senior leadership, human resources, product teams, external forensic firms, and law enforcement when appropriate. The canonical skill set includes structuring an incident response workflow comprising initial investigation, containment, eradication and remediation, recovery and monitoring, root cause analysis, documentation, and post incident lessons learned. Practical knowledge of notification triggers and timelines under major privacy and health laws is required, for example the General Data Protection Regulation seventy two hour notification expectation, the California Consumer Privacy Act requirement to notify without undue delay, and breach assessment principles under the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. Candidates should be able to recommend a breach notification strategy identifying who to notify and when, prepare regulator and customer communications, manage reputational and psychological impacts, and describe prevention measures such as data minimization, encryption, access controls, logging and monitoring, vulnerability management, and incident response testing.