Hope they have an incident response plan.

The consequences of a cyber-attack can range from a nuisance phishing email to a successful ransomware attack compromising the entire network and effectively shutting down the whole company or even corporate espionage.

What doesn’t change is that your company has to be prepared for the various attacks and have considered the most effective way to deal with them. In the same way that your company has a fire drill, so everyone knows what to do and where to go in an emergency, an incident response plan provides details about what you and your employers needs to do for potentially, just as devastating emergency if a cyber-attack is successful.

Potential Scenario

Attackers infiltrate your manufacturer’s corporate network and installed malicious software. This malware allows the attackers to obtain employee log-in credentials, which in turn could be used to target other key systems within your company that contains intellectual property.

What would you do?

If you can’t already put your hands on an incident response plan, then ask yourself the question seriously. What would you do?

Who would you need to speak to? What risks are present that will need mitigation? Does a third party need to become involved such as media/PR, lawyers, etc.

If you haven’t already got a plan, we have a free template which is a starting point for your own. You can download it here.

The template contains flowcharts and checklists as well as posters so that your team can see what actions they need to take should they be the first aware of a problem.

What else should we do?

Like running fire alarm drills, you should also practice your incident response plan and make sure that covers everything that you need it to.

We can help you to do this by hosting business continuity exercises. We use elements of the international business continuity management systems standard ISO/IEC 22301:2019 as a model to review your continuity planning and includes aspects such as internal and external (customer and public) communications, recovery objectives (tolerable downtime, tolerable service loss), disaster recovery and recovery testing and exercises.

Further guidance & support

The Eastern Cyber Resilience Centre is a not-for-profit membership organisation, run by policing, with the intention of increasing cyber resilience of SMEs within the East of England.

You can join our community for free.

You can contact the Cyber Resilience Centre for guidance and support through our e-mail enquiries@ecrcentre.co.uk or use our online booking system to make an appointment with one of our team.

Community members receive regular updates which include the latest guidance, news, and security updates.

Policing led – business focussed.