Interesting analysis:

When cyber incidents occur, victims should be notified in a timely manner so they have the opportunity to assess and remediate any harm. However, providing notifications has proven a challenge across industry.

When making notifications, companies often do not know the true identity of victims and may only have a single email address through which to provide the notification. Victims often do not trust these notifications, as cyber criminals often use the pretext of an account compromise as a phishing lure.

[…]

This report explores the challenges associated with developing the native-notification concept and lays out a roadmap for overcoming them. It also examines other opportunities for more narrow changes that could both increase the likelihood that victims will both receive and trust notifications and be able to access support resources.

The report concludes with three main recommendations for cloud service providers (CSPs) and other stakeholders:

1. Improve existing notification processes and develop best practices for industry.
2. Support the development of “middleware” necessary to share notifications with victims privately, securely, and across multiple platforms including through native notifications.
3. Improve support for victims following notification.

While further work remains to be done to develop and evaluate the CSRB’s proposed native notification capability, much progress can be made by implementing better notification and support practices by cloud service providers and other stakeholders in the near term.