What are the fundamentals of a strong cybersecurity incident response plan?

A cyber incident response plan should address any type of privacy or security breach — not only cyberattacks. Consider that one of the largest privacy breaches in recent years, involving Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, had nothing to do with a cyber breach. While many cyber breaches lead to privacy breaches, not all privacy breaches arise from a cyber event.

Four incident response fundamentals that will protect your organization right now

A strong incident response plan is built on four fundamentals.

Alignment with mission critical business processes

You can’t protect everything because resources, money, and time are finite. Focus on what could cause the organization to cease to exist if attacked. Perform IT-driven business impact analyses to better understand the scope of assets and their importance.

Tested escalation paths and communications channels

It’s easy to overlook the basics in your response plan, but they are vitally important – especially for your insurer. They expect proof of fundamental security measures like cyber education, multi-factor authentication, and offline backups. They also expect escalations and notifications to align with their processes and timelines. You’ll need to ensure you can prove the right steps were taken should an incident occur.

Actions lists for a complete enterprise response

Cyber incidents are not “just an IT problem to fix” – impacts cause disruptions and consequences across the enterprise. Brand reputation, financials, staff well-being, and many more all need to be handled with professionalism. Ensure that your organization’s cyber incident response plan follows crisis management best principles and provides action and discussion-based checklists for technology, management, and communications responses.

Established third party vendors and contacts

Third party cyber incident response and crisis management teams who handle ransomware, cyber organized crime groups, data leakage, financial loss, on the daily are best equipped to guide and support your organization during these significant events. Having them on retainer in advance of a crisis removes the legal and insurance barriers/slowdowns of contract approvals during a response when time is critical.

Testing your cyber incident response plan through exercises is becoming the norm – as well as expectation – to prove care and diligence by leadership should an incident escalate to court proceedings. IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2023 found that companies with a tested incident response plan saved an average of $1.76 million compared to those without these measures in place.