A leading UK veterinary services provider faced a data breach when a notorious ransomware group published 337 GB of sensitive personal information on the dark web. Elevate was engaged to investigate the scope of the breach and mitigate potential risks.

Challenge

• Intense pressure for a swift and thorough investigation of the potentially affected data servers to detect the scope of the breach of more than 1.1 million documents
• Urgent need to determine the full scope of the breach vis-à-vis file paths or source folders known to have been breached
• Almost 60% of the review population consisted of unstructured files, including spreadsheets, text files, and PDFs
• Numerous types of highly sensitive, compromised information (including NINOs, PPS numbers, employment records, and details relating to bank accounts, passports, and driver’s licenses) across immense data set

Solution

• Design and implementation of customised workflow, including
  in-depth trends analysis using AI techniques to provide breach counsel with detailed and valuable insights, including breakdowns of the PII document types
• Data mining to identify approximately 220,000 documents needing review and exclude the remaining material
• Elevate’s India-based specialist review team worked extended hours to ensure prompt review of large .txt files, lengthy forms, PDFs, and unstructured spreadsheets to extract PII