On average, it takes 191 days before a business realises that the personal data of its customers or employees has been lost or stolen. This paper proposes a simple, low cost and effective way of reducing the number of days it takes to identify if a data breach has occurred. The solution can be implemented in hours for businesses large and small.

Through the deployment of Time-windowed Auditable Beacon Strings (TABS), businesses can also materially reduce the overall costs associated with a breach while complying with GDPR’s breach detection requirements. While the methodology can also be used to comply with data protection and privacy regulatory frameworks such as SOX, PCI, HIPAA, FFIEC, FISMA and NERC- CIP, this paper focuses on GDPR due to its timeliness.