Cyber Incident Response is foundational when defining the cyber maturity of an organisation, and speaks volumes about the attention placed on cybersecurity by the board and its executives. It is deemed by the industry as a critical and defining risk factor as it can easily cripple an organization depending on the nature of the breach.
Preparing for a cyber incident is tough work. It is complicated and requires a great deal of diligence and discipline. It also requires a great deal of collaboration amongst all the key stakeholders. Simply put, it’s a big production.
The goal is not to prevent a cyber incident. That is just inevitable. The goal is to mitigate the risks associated with cyber incidents, especially the damage they can cause to an organization from a brand and financial standpoint; The objective here is to be cyber incident ready.
As a trusted cybersecurity partner, CTRL Group work with clients as an extension of their team to help them obtain a deep and accurate understanding of their cyber capabilities, as well as benchmark their cyber maturity against best in class practices and standards. This then sets us up for delivering a functional and practical solution to helping clients build strong incident response capabilities and be able to handle incidents well when they occur.
Top 10 tips are compiled below, which the CTRL Team commonly share with the CTRL Community before embarking on an incident response journey with them.
Note that these are simply broad tips and a professional cybersecurity partner is needed to assist with the development and implementation of your incident response capabilities.
Top 10 Tips to be Cyber Incident Ready:
- Identify your stakeholders’ security requirements and expectations in the event of a cybersecurity incident.
- Define and assign roles to the team that will be managing the incident.
- Brainstorm with your business team the nightmare scenarios with the greatest potential impact on the business.
- Ensure your incident escalation procedures are well documented and communicated to your staff. This must include managing internal and external communication regarding the breach.
- Define a standard for managing and tracking all actions during an incident.
- Create template communications documents for your most likely breach scenarios.
- Build your incident response plan outlining a detailed list of actions to take, external parties who can assist, and entities you must report to for example.
- Create a plan on a page, and an at-a-glance workflow for resolving incidents that staff can quickly refer to in a crisis.
- Test your plan. Run a tabletop exercise workshop for a day by day play of your incident response plan. This should be conducted at least once a year.
- Ensure revising the plan is integrated into change management procedures for major incidents to ensure it stays relevant and current.
If you’d like to learn more, please get in touch with our security specialists to discuss our incident response offering and much more. The journey to become cyber incident ready starts today.
