Cyber Resilience - Take Action - Respond

What will happen in your business when you get the dreaded call, “You’ve been a victim of a cyber attack!”

Do you run into the distance with your hands over your ears, saying it isn’t so or does the incident response plan simply kick into action? Your incident response must be one important part of your total cyber resilience readiness. No matter how big your business is, everyone is a target and therefore everybody must be prepared.

No matter whether you sell product, manufacture goods or perform services you have information which is important to a cyber criminal. You must understand that you will suffer a breach and be ready to stop it, remediate it and carry on. 

Whether you base your incident response on one of the security frameworks or not an important part of incident response is in the name itself response. Please make sure you are ready to react immediately. There is no time for strategy discussions, do not start to investigate, do not look for how it started – respond. Take action. End it before it ends you.

An IBM security study found that in 2017 the average total organisational cost of data breaches in SA was R32 million. Let that sink in for a while, most businesses today do not allocate anything other than lip service to cyber threats. Boards and management say that cyber threats are one of the biggest risks to their organisations, larger entities put this into their annual reports – but they still do not allocate a single cent to security.

What impact will R32 Million have on your business?

Cyber security is a business risk and today it is more of a risk than virtually any other. This is because we are hyper-connected and our businesses and people are part of an always connected world. Our people interact with both business and personal platforms all the time. Does your cyber resilience methodology cover all of this?

Do you have visibility on what everybody is doing, both on and off your network? If you do not know what goes on day-to-day how do you even know whether you’ve been breached and how can you say you are secure?

Cyber resilience is critical in todays connected world. Action is more critical. We cannot continue to do things the same way in a new world. Your incident response starts long before any incident and there are many steps that can be used to mitigate the risk of a breach. Some are simple, many are straightforward. All require action.

Sadly most will simply speak but do nothing and when the call comes, run screaming into the distance. Do not get caught up in strategy sessions which yield no actions. Do something – act now.

John Mc Loughlin