Stay One Step Ahead: Essential Cyber Incident Response Tips for Your Business

Stay One Step Ahead: Essential Cyber Incident Response Tips for Your Business

Fighting cybercrime is like playing a never-ending game of cat and mouse. Even with extensive preventative measures, the world of cyber-attacks is rapidly expanding and unfortunately cyberattacks still occur.  

 Are you ready to act if your business gets attacked? There are very specific instructions you should follow to reduce damage and protect your reputation should your business get hit by a cyberattack, ransomware, or data breach. 

 Steps to Take if You’re Attacked

1. Stay Calm: Don’t panic. Contact your IT department right away.
2. Follow Your Incident Response Plan: Put your cyber incident response plan to work! 

 What is a Cyber Incident Response Plan? 

 A cyber incident response planning strategy is a set of tools and written procedures that your security team can use to identify, eliminate, and recover from cybersecurity threats. This plan is designed to help your team respond quickly and uniformly against any type of external threat.  Your incident response plan should be written down and reviewed regularly. 

 Benefits of a Response Plan 

 Aside from the obvious reasons to have an incident response plan in place, there are other benefits such as: 

• Your organization is fully equipped to respond to and recover from cybersecurity attacks. 

• The team in charge of response and recovery is well-trained and knows their duties.  

• Ensures compliance with organizational and regulatory requirements. 

 Steps in a Cyber Incident Response Plan

• Step 1: Notify your IT department immediately so they can contain the cyber-attack if they have not done so already. Shut down the internet and power off your firewall and switches. Do NOT turn off or restart any devices as this may remove valuable forensic data.  

• Step 2: Advise everyone to refer to event as a “cyber incident” don’t use language like “ransomware attack”, or “cyber-attack”, because you do not have enough information to make that statement yet.  

• Step 3: Contact your cyber insurance company to open a cyber incident. They will be able to determine if a claim is needed, as well as get you a team of 3rd party experts involved for forensic investigation, litigation, PR needs, etc.  

• Step 4: Consider your IT infrastructure a crime scene, do not make any changes until you are told to do so.  

• Step 5: Keep a log of events. Determine what data was compromised.  

• Step 6: Establish a team of employees and insurance contractors and begin holding conference calls. Ideally you have an insurance company employee, forensics contractor, your IT team and a lawyer and Exec leader on every conference call.  

• Step 7: Do not tell your employees what is happening. Do not issue any press releases to vendors or clients, until told to do so from your Cyber professionals.  

• Step 8: Do not turn off and back on any equipment. The power cycle can cause illicit scripts to run which will further damage your IT infrastructure.  

Each business is different, so your plan might need extra steps. The important thing is to act quickly and follow the plan. 

 Being prepared to respond to a cyberattack is a crucial component to your cyber security practice. If you’re unsure whether your cybersecurity practices and incident response plan are up to par, don’t wait until it’s too late.  

Contact Proper Sky today for expert guidance and IT support. Our team is ready to help you protect your business and ensure you’re always one step ahead of potential threats. Contact us now to learn more about securing your organization’s future.