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In a world with no shortage of frequency or types of cyberattacks, cybersecurity is something worth investing in. COVID-19 has caused many businesses to move to an online office setting, which only increases the possibility of cyber attacks. To say an attack is inevitable would be an overstatement, but in 2019, alone, more than 625 million online records were breached by hackers.
With numbers like this in mind, there has been plenty of data gathered to allow for a swift recovery after a cyber breach. Here are six tips.
Enact (or Create) a Response Team
If you have been lucky enough to dodge cyber attacks thus far, taking a proactive approach to fixing one is a great idea. Training a crisis response team on these tips and other practices will make your clean up even quicker. Crisis communication strategies and practices are different than day-to-day comms, and keeping the response activities internal can prevent further damage occurring due to the breach.
Have a Policy in Place
This is another tip that is proactive in nature, but makes reactive responses much more fluid as well. As is no secret in the business world, turnover is frequent, and having a written policy that your Response Team frequently trains on (and updates when needed), will help ensure that no gaps in employment will affect your response protocols when it comes to cyber attacks.
Count the Losses
If a breach does occur, the first step after ensuring it has been confined is determining what all was affected by said breach. Determining the “what” in regards to a breach will determine the next steps, and should generally be a quick one. Hopefully your pool of stolen data will be small an only affect one or two individuals, but if a whole database of emails addresses were stolen, there are much bigger issues to deal with.
Evaluate the “Why” and Update Accordingly
Technology is near the top of the list of industries that evovle quickly. If you’ve been a victim of a cybersecurity attack, it’s probably time to look at a new line of security software. In a proactive manner, constantly updating your means of protection should be a regular practice, as well as training your staff in data protection. Simple things like frequent password changes can still prevent breaches that cost companies days of inoperability and hours of problems to fix even after activities commence following a breach.
Allow for your cyber protections to evolve as quickly as the elements working against them.
Use What You’ve Got
Another proactive process is that of data backup. Though not all “stolen” data is actually removed from a given database, some certainly is and utilizing any and all backup procedures should be a very early step in the recovery process. Even if breach reports determine no data was actually stolen, just copied or otherwise compromised, backups exists for that very reason… as backups, and should be utilized as such.
Reflash Watch
Firefighting teams don’t just walk away once a fire has been put out. They set a reflash watch to make sure it doesn’t reignite. The same thinking should be done with data breaches. Keep an eye on the areas that were affected, and up the frequency of security updates and analysis.
Preparation is the most important thing you can do to avoid data breaches, but when they do occur, these tips will help minimize the time it takes to get a company back on the straight and narrow, and back to making money.
