Cyberattacks can be incredibly damaging for any company. So it is important to know how you can recover from a cyberattack. Even small-scale attacks can be huge for a company. Let alone a larger attack that might throw your company into a crisis.
Recovering from a cyberattack can take anywhere from a few weeks to months. This all depends on how well you prepare your business against threats online.
In this blog, we will go over the steps to take to recover from a cyberattack. Even if you’re not tech-savvy, familiarising yourself with these steps could be the difference between recovering quickly or not at all.
Steps to Recover from a Cyberattack
Involve a Trusted Advisor
No matter how much you know about cybersecurity, a trusted advisor will be the best person to consult about moving forward from a cyberattack.
They can also help strengthen your security to ensure the same doesn’t occur in the future. Getting in touch with trusted advisors like ourselves can also provide other services for your company.
Getting in touch with ourselves who can help you move forward. We can help protect your company from cyberattacks is a great way to make sure that your business isn’t crippled in the future by an incident.
We’re here to help you recover from a cyberattack! Contact us if you want to take the first step to move past a cybersecurity incident.
Create and Follow a Cyber Incident Response Plan
A Cyber Incident Response Plan is a document that outlines whats you should do in the event of a cyber incident. They are crucial to any business. Especially with the rising threat of cybercrime and an attack being possible at any moment. This will be key to helping you recover from a cyberattack.
A basic Cyber Incident Response Plan should contain:
- Key Contacts: These are key IT contacts within your organisation — such as your trusted advisor, IT personnel, Senior Management, PR, HR, Legal, and Insurance. Ensure that multiple contact methods are included to avoid key personnel becoming unavailable.
- Escalation Criteria: This is a criterion of when to seriously escalate an issue, to avoid false flags and other possibilities that could cause unnecessary vulnerability or waste resources.
- Basic Flowchart: A flowchart of simple steps to take to ensure that personnel is aware of the priorities going forward.
- A Conference Number: This should be available for urgent incident calls.
- Basic Guidance on Legal or Regulatory Requirements: An overview of legal and regulatory requirements such as when to engage legal counsel and HR.
Ensuring that this plan not only exists but is regularly kept up to date is crucial.
Follow Your Business Continuity Plan
A business continuity plan (BCP) is a prevention and recovery system that helps mitigate risks. Any company should have a plan in place to ensure that they’re protected from any major incident. This includes to recover from a cyberattack within their institution.
Ensuring to follow this plan includes training colleagues, employees, and staff on the importance of the plan and how it should be undertaken. This way, everyone knows exactly what they need to be doing and all confusion in the stressful situation is eliminated.
Safely Recover Data
At this point, you’ll want to start restoring your data and infrastructure to get your company back to the point where it was before the attack. With this, you’ll want to restore data from any backups and archives you have access to.
This is why it’s imperative that you back up your company’s data regularly. In the event of a catastrophe, having an isolated backup where you can easily restore your organisation’s data is one of the best ways to ensure that you can get your company back up and running as fast as possible.
Ensure that there are no remaining vulnerabilities before recovering your data, to ensure that you don’t leave access for a possible future breach. Ensuring that you’re doing everything safely is essential, to remove any possible future risks.
Learn from the Attack
Any attack is a learning opportunity for your institution. To ensure a breach or attack doesn’t happen in the future, by analysing the attack and noting the vulnerabilities and possible causes of the breach is key.
Ensure that this is an honest and clear process. There is no point in covering up mistakes and flaws. Improving them is the only way to stop a future breach. Learning from any mistakes and vulnerabilities is the best way forwards. This ensures that your company is protected going forward, as it allows you to patch up those vulnerabilities and ensure that there are checks and balances to protect the organisation.
How We Can Help
Cyberattacks can be incredibly damaging to your business’s infrastructure, but there’s always a way forward. Ensuring to follow these steps to help your company get back to its best shape is vital. This will be the difference between a company that stumbles and a company that doesn’t when faced with recovering from a cyberattack.
Having a helping hand along the way can be so important. We are here to help, and to ensure that your company can be protected.
Have you thought about Cyber essentials? For more information on Cyber essentials and how we can help you, get in touch.