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Pre-Empting a Crisis: Planning Your Cybersecurity Incident Response

As we navigate an increasingly digital world, businesses must stay proactive in safeguarding their systems and data. FTI Consulting experts Wouter Veugelen, Ben Hamilton, Michael Khoury and Tim de Sousa explore how organisations should remain alert and prepare to respond to a potential cyber crisis.

Data breaches and cyber incidents have become a reality of modern business. Organisations must be proactive by establishing a well-defined response plan and training incident responders before an incident occurs.

Having an Incident Response Plan Is a Critical First Step

An incident response plan should outline the internal stakeholders required to participate and provide input when responding to a cyber incident, including representatives from legal, HR, communications, IT, security operations as well as the CIO and CISO. The plan should also identify key external advisors to guide you during an incident, covering communication, data privacy, and legal matters.

The Most Crisis-Ready Organisations Routinely Test Their Incident Response Plans

You can effectively test your incident response plan through tabletop exercises and simulations. These sessions bring together relevant stakeholders from across the organisation to practice how they would respond to a breach in a real-life scenario. Additionally, regular phishing simulations help train staff to recognise and avoid phishing attempts.

It's crucial that your responders don’t open the plan for the first time during a full-scale incident, which is why conducting cyber breach simulations is essential. These sessions create a safe environment for incident responders to engage with the plan, identify knowledge gaps, and address those gaps before an actual incident occurs.

Document and Test Your Organisation’s Systems Vulnerable to a Cyber Breach

The number of systems potentially affected by a cyber breach is increasing rapidly, including cloud platforms, online collaboration tools, messaging apps, and evidence repositories that hold highly sensitive information. To enhance your cyber preparedness and minimise risk, you should:

develop a comprehensive plan that identifies and documents all of your organisation’s systems vulnerable to breaches
conduct regular security testing of these systems to identify vulnerabilities that could expose them to external threats.

FTI Consulting can support your cybersecurity incident response at every step. Find out more here.