As cyber threats are constantly evolving and becoming more complicated, your business must be well-prepared. If you’re a small business or a decent-sized organisation working online, you should consider investing in IT security.
Your company should also have an effective plan to respond to cybersecurity incidents that may take place. If you fail to have one, a cyber attack could lead to massive losses and might even shut down completely.
Due to this, businesses must be well-equipped to deal with threats like hackers and ransomware. While it may take some time and effort, it’ll be worth the investment, and you can run your business with peace of mind.
To ensure you create an effective plan, we’ve made a step-by-step guide on how to respond to a cybersecurity incident. Following these steps ensures that your business can minimise losses in case of a cyber-attack on your company.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
Step 1: Identifying the Incident
Identifying the incident is the first and the most crucial step towards delivering a proper response to the threat. If you don’t identify the threat quickly, it could lead to more problems with a high risk of data leaks and losses.
You can identify cybersecurity threats through dedicated detection and monitoring tools in your devices. These include applications like firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and SIEM software.
After you’ve identified the cybersecurity threat, you need to determine the severity and scope of the cyber attack. It helps you to figure out the next step you need to take to get the situation under control.
Step 2: Contain the Threat
Once you identify the security threat, the next step is to work toward containing the cybersecurity incident. A cyber attack is similar to a forest fire and could cause unrecoverable damage if you don’t take action immediately.
You can contain the threat by disabling network access to infected devices to avoid viruses and ransomware from spreading. You can also work on installing security packages to solve cybersecurity issues and other vulnerabilities.
We recommend working with cyber security experts to contain the threat appropriately. It ensures that your business can avoid additional damage, and it may also reduce downtime.
Step 3: Assess the Damage
After you’ve managed to contain the cybersecurity incident, the next step is to assess the extent of the damage. The first thing you should consider doing is checking the source of the security incident.
Was it an external attack? Or was it caused due to viruses spreading from an internal device? It should help to give a good idea of where the attack originated from, and what issues they’ve caused to the business networks and devices.
After that, you should analyse log files and review the system configurations. It should give you a good overall idea of what data has been compromised and which systems have been affected.
Step 4: Notify the Relevant Parties
After you managed to assess the extent of the damage, you should notify the relevant parties. These include the heads of the company, like the senior management and IT department, and the company partners.
You should give them detailed information about the cybersecurity incident and highlight the necessary points. If the situation is severe, you may also have to notify the concerned authorities.
It ensures that no one is out of the loop with the incident, and can work towards fixing the damage from the incident.
Step 5: Remediate the Incident
After you’ve updated the concerned authorities, it’s time to work towards remediating the incident. In this stage, you work towards recovering any stolen data or making changes to get rid of viruses and malware.
This step will involve applying security patches towards your network and devices, restoring backups, and more. You should also take additional measures to prevent these attacks from happening again.
Step 6: Review and Learn
The last step towards responding to a cybersecurity incident is to review and learn from the experience. We recommend holding a meeting with your team for a post-incident review.
In this meeting, you can work on identifying areas for improvement and making updates to your incident response plan. You can also consider hiring a cyber security team to help you come up with an effective plan to avoid incidents like this from happening again.
Conclusion
By following these steps, your company can respond to a cybersecurity incident effectively. However, you should work towards avoiding such incidents, because these situations tend to cause massive losses.
Therefore, you must work towards making your cyber security more effective. We recommend holding meeting regularly and constantly updating your plan to deal with new and evolving threats.
It ensures that your business can run smoothly without you worrying about your business facing a cybersecurity incident.
