Developing a strong cyber resilience strategy is crucial to effectively support business continuity, reduce incident impact, and enhance the ability to quickly recover from a cybersecurity incident. A cyber resilience strategy prepares you to face these inevitable incidents with confidence rather than living in fear of potential threats, whether malicious or inadvertent.
Below you will find practical advice and tactical strategies to help you prepare for incidents and begin building a comprehensive cyber resilience strategy.
What is cyber resilience?
Cyber resilience is your ability to prepare for, respond to, and recover from cyber incidents. Beyond prevention alone, cyber resilience emphasizes maintaining operations during an attack and recovering quickly afterward. A cyber resilient enterprise strives to minimize downtime, protect sensitive information, maintain customer trust, ensure regulatory compliance, and safeguard financial stability.
Adopting a resilient perspective helps you shift from a reactive to a proactive stance, preparing for expected incidents and ensuring that your organization can withstand challenges. However, embracing and achieving cyber resiliency can be a struggle, especially for small and medium-sized businesses which often have a more fractured cyber approach.
Consider these data points from Inacom identifying resilience and continuity challenges faced by companies:
- 7% say they can recover and restore in 1-3 days
- 35% say it takes 4 to 6 days to recover
- 34% need 1 or 2 weeks to recover
- 23% need more than 3 weeks to recover data and restore processes
Cyberthreats are not just possibilities but certainties. Ensuring business continuity amidst these threats requires more than just defensive measures; it demands a comprehensive cyber resilience strategy.
Apply a structured approach to build resiliency
When building your cyber resilience plan, consider implementing the structured approach below to get started on your journey. While not all-encompassing, these tactical actions support a confident approach to incident response and resiliency.
Stop, assess, and contain
When an incident occurs, your initial goals are to stop the threat from spreading, understand the impact, and implement measures to control the situation.
Stop the spread
First things first: contain the threat to prevent it from spreading further. This could involve isolating affected systems, blocking malicious IP addresses, or disabling certain network segments. The goal is to prevent an attacker from moving laterally within your network.
- Tip: Implement network segmentation and micro-segmentation to limit the spread of an attack. By dividing your network into smaller, isolated segments, you make it harder for attackers to move freely.
- Tip: Resist the temptation to power down specific machines that may be responsible for spreading malware as this may cause the loss of critical forensic information required for evidentiary purposes. Instead, leave machines powered on but disconnected from networks (i.e., remove ethernet plugs or disable wireless connectivity). Consult with your organization’s legal department and, when necessary, external authorities before progressing.
Assess the damage
Once the immediate threat is contained, assess the scope and impact of the incident. What systems have been affected? What data has been compromised? Understanding the full extent of the damage will inform your next steps.
- Tip: Use advanced cybersecurity tools to quickly and accurately assess the scope of a cybersecurity incident. Tools that utilize artificial intelligence and machine learning can help identify anomalies and trace an attacker’s movements within your network.
Contain and control
Now, put measures in place to ensure the attack doesn't escalate. This may involve patching vulnerabilities, updating firewalls, and enhancing monitoring to watch for further suspicious activity.
- Tip: Develop an incident response playbook that includes specific containment strategies for different types of attacks. This increases the likelihood of a swift and coordinated response.
- Tip: It’s not practical to try and develop a playbook for every potential threat your organization could face. Rather, consider conducting periodic enterprise risk assessments. The results from risk assessments will allow you to prioritize the threats for which you should first develop playbooks.
Communicate, eradicate, and recover
With the immediate threat contained, it’s time to re-energize communications, eradicate the threat, and start the recovery process.
Communicate clearly
Effective communication throughout the entire lifecycle of a cyber incident is vital. As you progress through all phases of incident response, ensure that critical stakeholders, including employees and customers, are informed about the incident and the mitigation steps being taken. Transparency helps build and maintain trust.
- Tip: Have a communication plan in place before an incident occurs. This should include pre-drafted statements and a list of key contacts who should be informed immediately.
- Tip: Depending on the nature of a cybersecurity incident, contacts with whom you communicate may include internal personnel (including privacy and legal), external state and local authorities, and federal authorities. Ensure you include all relevant categories of contacts in your incident response plan documentation.
Eradicate the threat
Next, focus on removing the threat from your systems entirely. This involves removing any malware, closing exploited security gaps, and enhanced monitoring to ensure there are no lingering threats.
- Tip: Use endpoint detection and response tools to thoroughly scan and clean affected systems. These tools can help reduce the likelihood that malicious code or backdoors are left behind.
Recover and restore
After prioritizing communication and eradicating the threat, begin the process of recovery. Restore affected systems from clean backups and bring operations back online. This step requires careful coordination to ensure that systems are restored securely and efficiently.
- Tip: Regularly test your backup and restoration processes to ensure they function efficiently when needed. This includes verifying the integrity of backups and ensuring they are free from malware.
- Tip: Restoration of systems from backups could potentially cause the loss of critical forensic information required for evidentiary purposes. Consult with your organization’s legal department and, when necessary, external authorities before progressing.
Review, learn, and prepare
Once a cybersecurity incident is resolved, it’s crucial to review what happened, learn from it, and prepare for the future.
Review the incident
Conduct a thorough after-action analysis to understand the effects and cause of the cybersecurity incident. This involves reviewing logs, interviewing key personnel, determining the overall effectiveness of your response, and most importantly, assessing the adequacy of your incident response documentation.
- Tip: Hold a post-incident review meeting with relevant stakeholders. This should include the development of a timeline of events, an analysis of what went well, and areas for improvement.
Learn from the experience
Use the insights gained from the after-action review to improve your cybersecurity posture. This could involve updating policies, enhancing role-based training programs, or investing in new technologies.
- Tip: Create a lessons-learned document that summarizes the key takeaways from the incident. Share this document with all relevant stakeholders in your organization to ensure as many staff members as possible can benefit from the experience.
Prepare for the future
Finally, take proactive steps to strengthen your cyber resiliency. This includes regularly updating your incident response plan, conducting regular tabletop exercises, and staying informed about the latest threats and risk mitigation practices.
- Tip: Invest in threat intelligence services to stay ahead of emerging cyberthreats. By integrating real-time threat data into your cybersecurity strategy, you can anticipate and mitigate potential risks more effectively.
Elevate confidence through preparation
Building confidence and cyber resiliency requires significant time, effort, and planning. It involves creating comprehensive incident response plans, conducting regular risk assessments, and investing in the latest, relevant cybersecurity technologies. When you prepare thoroughly, you can respond to incidents more effectively, reducing the impact of breaches and ensuring a quicker recovery.
Preparation also includes training employees on cybersecurity best practices and conducting tabletop exercises to test the effectiveness of response strategies. By fostering a culture of awareness and readiness, you can build confidence among your teams, knowing you are ready to handle any cyberthreat that comes your way.
Apply metrics to resiliency
Measuring cyber resilience is crucial for understanding the effectiveness of your cyber resilience strategy (when comparing to organizational objectives) and identifying areas for improvement. Here are some key metrics to consider:
- Recovery time objective (RTO): The maximum acceptable length of time it should take to restore a system.
- Recovery point objective (RPO): The maximum acceptable amount of data loss measured in time.
- Mean time to detect (MTTD): The average time it takes to detect a cyber incident.
- Mean time to respond (MTTR): The average time it takes to respond to a detected incident.
- Incident frequency: The number of incidents occurring within a specific time frame.
- Downtime duration: The total time systems are down due to a cyber incident.
By tracking these metrics, you can gauge your resilience, make data-driven decisions, and continuously improve your cybersecurity posture.
Commit to a cyber resilience strategy
Time is money. The longer it takes your organization to recover from a cybersecurity incident, the greater the cost will be. Yes, it is impossible to plan for every potential threat. However, to help bridge that gap, you can build and maintain resiliency and prepare as best as you can.
Cyber resiliency isn’t a one-time effort; it’s an ongoing commitment to preparedness, adaptability, and continuously striving for excellence. With the recommendations above as your guide, you can build confidence and a cyber resilience strategy that helps your organization withstand and recover from cyber incidents effectively and within your organization’s defined recovery time objectives.
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