1. Call in support and reinforcements
As a small or medium business, you might not have in-house IT expertise. Call in people who can help you resolve the incident and make any technical, legal and business decisions. These people could include an IT service provider, a lawyer and your bank.
Note: Even if you’re an IT expert, during an incident you’ll have to stay focused on keeping your business running and managing the response, while others work to resolving the technical aspects of the incident.
Report a cyber incident to PNGCERT.
2. Triage and contain the incident
Depending on the type of incident and what systems are affected, you will need to take steps to contain the incident and prevent any further damage. This might mean temporarily shutting down or suspending some of your business operations.
3. Tell your staff
Once you’ve identified the incident you’ll need to let your staff know. They need to be aware of the incident, what the next steps are and who is leading the incident response.
Make sure staff have the correct information they need to respond to any customer or supplier enquiries. It’s important that messaging is clear and consistent – they’re your frontline for any incoming questions and concerns.
4. Let your customers know
One of the most difficult parts of an incident can be letting your customers know about it and how it might affect them. Once you know some details about the incident, you may have to disclose it to your customers. You may decide to let your customers know about an incident even if you’re not sure they’ve been, or will be affected. This decision will need to be made on a case-by-case basis.
5. Maintain business as usual
A cyber security incident can be costly and time consuming to recover from. To minimize the impacts, try to keep the unaffected systems of your business running. You might appoint a staff member to take the lead of day-to-day operations while you focus on the incident and keep track of response and recovery process, decisions and actions.
6. After the incident
Once the incident is resolved, there are some important last steps to round out the response. These include:
- a debrief with staff on what went well and what could be done better
- completing an incident report to document what happened, what decisions were made and why. This document may be helpful for any investigations or insurance claims
- monitoring activities closely to make sure the incident hasn’t reoccurred or that any other systems have been affected by the response
- responding to any enquiries from customers who were affected by the incident
- updating policies or noting changes to systems as a result of the incident
- updating, or creating, your incident response plan with lessons learned.
Being prepared for a cyber security incident and having a plan in place will help with response, recovery and reduce the impacts on your business.
Preparing for a cyber security incident
