Is your business prepared to handle and swiftly recover from a cyber-attack? Typically, it takes around 20 to 30 days for a company to bounce back from a significant cyber incident. However, even after operational recovery, the financial and reputational consequences can linger for years.
To help minimise the impact of a cyber-attack it is important for an organisation to implement a cyber resilience strategy.
What is cyber resilience?
Cyber resilience refers to an organisation’s capacity to prevent, withstand, and bounce back from cybersecurity incidents. It encompasses preparation and planning, protection, detection, response, and recovery.
Remaining focused on protecting your business is critical but just as important is knowing what to do if a cyber-attack occurs. Hackers are always that one step ahead so you need to be prepared to react to a cyber-attack.
Cyber resilience really matters. The stakes are high – cyber-attacks can lead to financial losses, operational disruptions, and significant damage to a company’s reputation.
5 guidelines for cyber resilience
1. Prepare: Do you know where your current risks are?
- Conducting a review of your current cyber posture against a cyber security framework is critical to ensure you have a complete picture of where your current gaps and risks are. Understand what the impacts are if these risks come to fruition. Establish a cyber strategy to address and mitigate the identified risks.
- Conduct regular risk assessment reviews to keep up with evolving threats, system changes, and regulatory changes.
- Do you have visibility of all your critical assets including hardware, software and data? Ensure you have a centralised system to manage and have visibility all your critical assets.
2. Protect: Do you have the right security controls in place to reduce the chances of a cyber incident occurring? Implement proactive measures and controls to prevent cyber-attacks.
3. Detect: How are you staying ahead of ever-evolving threats? Implement cyber monitoring and detection tools and procedures to continuously oversee your critical systems against current threats.
4. Respond: What is your game plan if a cyber incident occurs? Being prepared for a cyber incident is critical to limit the fallout of a cyber-attack.
- Implement cyber incident response strategy, policies, procedures that outline how you are going to respond to a cyber incident.
- Clearly defined communication plan: who is responsible for the communication, who needs to be engaged, who do you need to notify, what do you need to communicate and when?
- Conducting cyber incident response tabletop exercises to help identify where you may have gaps in dealing with a cyber incident before one actually happens. This will help determine your team’s readiness for potential vulnerabilities, incidents, and cyber threats.
5. Recover: How will you recover from an attack?
- Ensure you have backups in place to be able to restore your systems and data.
- Have a business continuity plan (BCP) outlining exactly what needs to be done to resume operations.
- Ensure you regularly test your backup and BCP.
Cyber resilience culture
For cyber resilience to be successful it is important to establish a culture where security is engrained into people’s work, habits, behaviour. It relies on all parts of the organisation adopting, taking accountability and proactively using cyber security practices in their day-to-day activities.
People are your number one asset and it is critical that they are regularly trained on cyber security awareness to help identify when something looks suspicious. Train people to also know who to engage to report suspicions and what to do in the event a cyber-attack. Remember, every moment counts and time is critical to isolate the impact of the cyber-attack.
Cyber resilience helps us stay committed to protecting against attacks. By following the guidelines and nurturing a culture of cyber security, you can safeguard your business and become more resilient when facing threats.
