FTI Technology Leads Response to Historic Data Breach, Applying Expert-Led Workflows Alongside IQ.AI

In a fast-moving data breach scenario involving more than 20 million documents and financial records, FTI Technology was engaged to extract and examine relevant data and help meet reporting obligations in the U.S. and European Union. The team leveraged IQ.AI by FTI Technology™ to help target personally identifiable information and support the financial services client in mitigating the incident as quickly as possible.

Situation

Just prior to a major federal holiday, a financial institution suffered a large scale breach impacting data in the U.S. and EU. The company needed to gain a sense of the scope of data impacted so it could issue notifications in compliance with applicable data protection regulations.

Starting with a set of more than 20 million potentially affected records that included significant amounts of personal information and content heavy materials, the client needed to quickly narrow down to the impacted documents. This required support from a provider with data infrastructure, technical capabilities and global team resources to handle receipt and transfer of the data.

Our Role

Under intense time pressure and with a client operating in crisis mode, FTI Technology led the legal team in transferring and processing the data securely in a matter of days. Once the full set was transferred, a large team of FTI Technology experts used supplemental information from the threat actor, alongside data analysis, metadata search and continuous active learning to reduce the population to only the relevant data that was likely to contain instances of sensitive or personally identifiable information.

Approximately 1.3 million documents were identified as relevant for review. The client had less than four months to fully complete analysis, extraction of personal data and reporting to regulatory agencies.

To ensure an accurate and thorough review under the required timeline, FTI Technology provided:

• A team of nearly 1,000 reviewers, equipped with FTI Technology’s proprietary workflows, various analytics tools to conduct thorough review, and large language models to efficiently read through documents containing more than 500 pages of potentially relevant information.
• Mapping of more than 300,000 spreadsheets and structured data sources, using IQ.AI to expedite manual review and expert oversight for validation.
• A combination of human and AI data extraction to increase throughput in identifying instances of personal data within documents.
• IQ.AI-powered workflow to find a large group of missing address extractions.
• E-discovery experts and data scientists leading every stage of the project to ensure accuracy and defensibility.

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