Businesses and organizations of all sizes have to be aware of the fact that they may one day become the victim of a cybersecurity attack. While you of course do everything you can to ensure you never fall victim to such an attack, the truth is that it is impossible to completely avoid.
If you are like most Americans, you will never have to deal with a cybersecurity attack. However, millions of Americans each year are victims of an attack, which occurs every 39 seconds in the country. For that reason, it’s incredibly important that you have a security event and incident management plan. Here are the steps you should take now to prepare for a cybersecurity incident.
Make a plan
One of the best ways to set up a security event and incident management plan is to actually make a plan. You would be shocked to learn about how many companies do not really consider cybersecurity a primary thing to stay on top of. That is what makes them vulnerable to attacks in the first place and it is why cyberattacks can be so profoundly damaging.
Make sure that you and your employees have guidance on how incidents can be detected, reported, assessed and responded to. In fact, it is smart to make a checklist that anyone can follow in the event of a security incident.
Have a response team
This might mean having a group of people in-house who are experts at IT and cybersecurity, or it may mean that you hire an out of house team to do the work for you, but make sure that you have some group in place to help you manage an attack and mitigate the damage. Beyond that, you want to make sure that all of your departments, whether it be sales, finance, human resource and more know how to contact that team directly in the case of an event so that no time is wasted.
Post-incident analysis
Finally, you want to be sure that you take the time necessary to analyze the event, figure out the scope of the damage, and see what you can glean from the event itself, once it has been contained and completed.
The reason this is so important is that learning from past attacks can — and will — help you be better protected from potential attacks in the future. As you know, attacks are an impossible thing to avoid completely, and the growing number of attacks per year are alarming. That is why you have to do everything you can before, during and after a cybersecurity incident to make sure that if you are victim to one, you will not become a victim to another event in the future.
Now that you have learned all this, it’s time to start setting up your very own security event and incident management plan.
