Cyber Crisis Management Planning

Book excerpt: Organizations around the world face a constant onslaught of attack from cyber threats. Whether it’s a nation state seeking to steal intellectual property or compromise an enemy’s critical infrastructure, a financially-motivated cybercriminal ring seeking to steal personal or financial data, or a social cause-motivated collective seeking to influence public opinion, the results are the same: financial, operational, brand, reputational, regulatory, and legal risks. Unfortunately, many organizations are under the impression their information technology incident response plans are adequate to manage these risks during a major cyber incident; however, that’s just not the case. A Cyber Crisis Management Plan is needed to address the cross-organizational response requirements in an integrated manner when a major cyber incident occurs. Cyber Crisis Management Planning: How to reduce cyber risk and increase organizational resilience provides a step-by-step process an organization can follow to develop their own plan. The book highlights a framework for a cyber crisis management plan and digs into the details needed to build the plan, including specific examples, checklists, and templates to help streamline the plan development process. The reader will also learn what’s needed from a project management perspective to lead a cyber crisis management plan development initiative, how to train the organization once the plan is developed, and finally, how to develop and run cyber war game tabletop exercises to continually validate and optimize the plan.