Cyberattacks can be incredibly damaging for any company. Even a small-scale attack can cripple certain parts of your organisation, 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 - and this all depends on how well you prepare your business against threats online.

In this article, we’re going to go over the steps to take to recover from a cyberattack. Even if you’ve not well versed in digital security, 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.

A trusted advisor is a professional organisation who understands cybersecurity at a higher level and can help you take steps to move forward. They can also help strengthen your security vulnerabilities to ensure the same doesn’t occur in the future. Trusted advisors like ourselves can also provide other services for your company.

Getting in touch with a provider who can help your organisation move forward and help you protect yourself from dangerous 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! 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 what a business or organisation 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.

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 to any business’s immediate success post-cyber-incident.

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Follow Your Business Continuity Plan

A business continuity plan (BCP) is a prevention and recovery system that helps mitigate risks and threats to a company. Any company should have a plan in place to ensure that they’re protected and have the plan to recover from any major incident 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 you must back up your company’s data regularly. In the event of a catastrophe, having an isolated backup that’s accessible with ease to 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, 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, as improving on these is the only way to stop a future breach. Learning from any mistakes and vulnerabilities is the best way to ensure 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, and will be the difference between a company that stumbles and a company that doesn’t when faced with such adversity.

Having a helping hand along the way can be one of the most important things to ensure that your company has the support and infrastructure to be protected from the dangers of the modern business environment. We’re here to help, and to ensure that your company can be both protected and provided with the best possible services to help you thrive going forward.

Whether you’re looking to take steps to recover from a cyberattack or to improve your future security against a potential breach, get in touch with us today! We’re a trusted advisor and can help you patch up any vulnerabilities that could be cause for concern.

Get in touch with our expert team for support today!