You Need a Cyberattack Response Plan. Here’s Why.

With Cybersecurity Awareness Month approaching in October, we wanted to share with you some additional cyber tips for you and your clients. Keep an eye out throughout October on PLM’s social accounts for more resources and communications to help you talk to your clients as well as your employees to protect your data and practice online safety within your organization.

As a business owner, protecting yourself against the threat of cyberattack is critically important.  The financial, reputational and emotional cost of a data breach can be devastating – and can threaten your company’s very existence. Putting proactive measures in place – including employee training, investing in encryption software, and creating two-step authentication processes – can help reduce the likelihood of a successful attack. But it’s equally important for you and your employees to have a Cyber Incident Response Plan ready in case your business should fall victim to a data breach.

Creating your plan will require some key steps to prepare:

• Build a Cyber Attack Response Team with representatives from all departments that will need to take action in response to the attack, e.g., upper management, IT, sales/marketing, communications, HR, legal
• Identify critical company assets most likely to be targeted and vulnerable. This could include employees if their cyber risk knowledge is low
• Research, identify and contract with external expertise and data back-up services if you do not have in-house resources and expertise to manage a cyber breach
• Create a detailed response check to capture the source of the attack, outline how to contain the breach and back-up and restore data, and lastly, list lessons learned
• Develop a communications plan including key audiences, communications vehicles and timing in the event of a breach. It’s critical that employees, customers and those whose personal information has been compromised be notified as soon as possible
• Practice executing your response plan by testing hypothetical scenarios

If you company data is breached, here are the key processes to remember:

• Investigate the source of the breach and identify the computer or network where the attack originated
• Attempt to isolate the infected device(s) to minimize damage
• Evaluate to the scope of what data was impacted by the breach
• Seek legal advice about complying with rules and regulations about reporting a data breach and the legal implications for your business
• Inform your insurer about the breach, if applicable. Cyber liability insurance coverage may cover the total cost of the incident, or the damages suffered by affected parties
• Notify all affected parties. If unknown, communicate to anyone potentially impacted by the breach
• Consider issuing a public statement if the impact of the breach is significant
• Clean your systems starting with quarantined devices and networks
• Restore lost data by identifying the most recent back-up that was not affected and can be used to restore lost data