Prepare for cyber incidents
All businesses will have to deal with a cyber incident at some point. And every second counts when it happens. Make a plan on how you will respond to incidents, and how you can recover from them. And regularly practise scenarios involving digital attacks. Then you will be better prepared for a digital incident. Find out what steps to take.
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Why this basic principle?
Not all digital incidents can be prevented. If something does go wrong, it is important that your organisation can quickly function as usual. This requires good preparation, such as having plans for continuity, emergency solutions, and recovery. You also need to have a plan for responding to incidents. Practising these plans and regularly testing backups (in Dutch) should be part of your preparation.
What can you do?
1. Know how to respond to cyber incidents
Responding to incidents quickly and correctly is important to prevent or limit damage. Based on your risk analysis (in Dutch), you can estimate which incidents may happen in your organisation. Include possible scenarios in your incident response plan. These will help you respond to an incident.
2. Recover from incidents
Is your company the victim of a cyberattack? Then it is important to assess the damage. Do not just think about actual costs and losses, but also about reputational damage, for example. As an entrepreneur, you must inform the right people, organisations and, in some cases, authorities. This is important for regaining trust, but also because in some cases reporting is mandatory.
3. Practise, test, and train
Response plans and recovery plans (in Dutch) are not always easy to carry out. Usually because the plans are not sufficiently practised, tested, and trained. Practising your response and recovery capabilities and different scenarios makes it clear how resilient you are in the event of a cyber incident. Also, regular education and training of your employees is important. They need to become familiar with their tasks in the response and recovery team, learn the procedures, and gain experience in doing these tasks. Take a look at the cyber exercises (in Dutch) that are available, free of charge.
4. Develop a backup strategy
Create a strategy for making backups. A backup is used to restore data if it is damaged. For example, due to a system error, incorrect storage, or a virus. A backup is also essential if a device with important business data is broken, lost, or stolen. Disconnect backups from your production network, store them on different types of media and in different (physical) locations, and encrypt the files for extra protection. Date the backups you make to reduce the chance of restoring an infected backup. It is also important to practise recovering a backup (in Dutch) and periodically test that the data is still intact.