How to Respond if Your Business Suffers a Cyberattack

No business ever wants to deal with this situation. However, it is the reality for a growing number of organisations across the world. Cyberattacks are becoming more prevalent, intelligent, and subtle, and this is leaving companies more vulnerable than ever to threats.

For any business that has to deal with a cyberattack, it can lead to serious ramifications. It could put them offline for a significant period of time, which leads to a major loss in sales. Confidential customer information might be stolen, which causes the company’s reputation to sink. A large sum of money may be taken from their bank account and never be seen again.

The list goes on and on.

If you ever find yourself in the position of dealing with a cyberattack, you need to do react in the right way. Here are the steps to responding after a cyberattack.

Communicate an attack has occurred

As soon as your business suffers from a cyberattack, you should let all relevant employees know about it. There’s no point in trying to keep it a secret. It also shouldn’t simply be your security team that hears about the attack. The likes of your customer service team, for instance, will need to know about it so they can deal with potentially awkward enquiries from customers in the future.

Furthermore, it is better to assemble a team to tackle the cyberattack rather than trying to do it all on your own.

Discover the problem

As Proofpoint notes in their cybersecurity and network security guide, there are many different forms of cyberattacks in this day and age. It is essential you understand the attack type that has breached your defences, along with why it has happened.

With antivirus software, this step shouldn’t be too difficult to complete. You scan your file systems to see what malware is present, and this should reveal the type of infection that is impacting your business network.

Contain and recover

Following discovery, the next step is to ensure the malware doesn’t spread any further and cause additional damage. Containment is essential because if it is left alone, it will spread like wildfire across your entire network.

Containment involves taking the affected system offline. It should then never be put back online until the malware is removed completely. Once this is done, you can then begin the recovery process. If you had to perform a system reset, for example, you will have to install your latest data backup onto the computer.

Assess and update your security system

Something went wrong with your security efforts. That is the only way to explain how you were the victim of a cyberattack. Due to this, and once you have eradicated the malware and got your business back up and running, the last step is assessing what happened.

You need to fix whatever hole was present in your security defences, whether this is an outdated piece of software or a negligent employee that clicked the wrong link.