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TOP ALLIES FOR EXECUTIVES & BOARDS TO LEVERAGE DURING A CYBER CRISISTOP ALLIES
FOR EXECUTIVES & BOARDS TO LEVERAGE DURING A CYBER CRISIS

It is imperative for executives and board members to know who their top allies
are, and how to best leverage them to successfully navigate a crisis and
minimize the harm caused by a breach.

Chris Crummey, Director, Executive & Board Cyber Services, Sygnia

September 27, 2024

5 Min Read
Source: Artur Marciniec via Alamy Stock Photo


COMMENTARY

Many organizations have gone to great lengths in preparing for a cyberattack,
leveraging both services and solutions to limit risk and exposure. Despite these
efforts, breaches persist, ransomware payouts have grown, and leaders continue
to make mistakes during cyber crises that impact organizations and customers
both short and long term.

Most of these mistakes happen when the stakeholders do not know their roles,
responsibilities, and what they are authorized to do in a crisis. This lack of
clarity causes friction when leaders are required to make several highly
impactful decisions during a cyber incident with little time and often limited
verified information.

The biggest challenge facing crisis response teams is the fact there simply is
never enough time to gather, verify, and analyze the necessary information to
make the best possible decision. Under the pressure of a compressed timeline and
increasingly concerned stakeholders, executives and board members tend to fixate
on finding ways to shorten the time to remediation.

They should also prioritize reducing present and future risks for the company
and ensure their teams do the same, but that often gets overlooked. As everyone
within the organization turns to leadership for guidance and direction, it's
important for those in charge to understand who their greatest allies are during
a crisis and how they can leverage them to minimize the business and
reputational impact of a breach.


OPEN AND ONGOING COMMUNICATIONS

During the crisis, leadership must rely on its guiding principles to define
their communication strategy and provide employees with a North Star that
explains what they need to do forthwith. This starts with establishing a secure
and classified crisis war room to collaborate and communicate under privilege,
categorizing the event and defining what can and cannot be shared, and clearly
defining roles and responsibilities for each stakeholder. This creates a
leadership filter that determines who is authorized to make decisions and sets a
timeline in motion for when information should be disseminated internally and
externally, which systems need to be taken offline or brought back on, and if or
when authorities and regulators should be contacted. 

Organizations must maintain constant communication with each line of business
throughout the crisis because it empowers employees to make the micro-decisions
necessary to limit the ongoing business and reputational harm. There is no
better example of this than former Maersk CEO Soren Skou, whose tip-of-the-spear
leadership helped the company navigate the unprecedented 2017 NotPetya malware
attack. Skou participated in all crisis calls and meetings, focused on internal
and external communication, and instructed all frontline staff across the 130
countries Maersk operates in to "do what you think is right to serve the
customer — don't wait for the HQ, we'll accept the cost." In doing so, Maersk
quickly mobilized to identify and remove the malware from its systems to restore
operations, provided real-time feedback to its stakeholders about the situation,
and resumed online books just eight days after the attack.


BUILT-IN ALTERNATIVES

Each decision made during a crisis can set off a chain reaction that can
compound damage. Business and security leaders often experience a rush of
cortisol during the first few hours of a crisis that induces the "fog of war"
feeling, clouding judgment and causing mistakes. It is important to understand
during these moments that each choice has multiple options, leaders must ask the
right information-gathering questions to support a full business response, and
there is no perfect answer or solution. 

Redundancy is a key strategy to save time during a crisis, and the most mature
organizations have created a collaborative response plan based on the PACE
model. For instance, if an organization suffers a ransomware attack and its
communications platforms are potentially compromised, moving to an alternate
platform quickly removes a significant amount of risk. Teams should be aligned
on how much risk they are willing to take with each decision and create a
coordinated understanding of their options. By working through the pros and cons
associated with these choices, executives and board members can determine which
decisions their organizations should make to get operations back up and running
as quickly and efficiently as possible.


DRIVING A CULTURE OF PREPAREDNESS

Organizations that have dedicated the necessary time to preparing their teams
for a crisis have confidence in their employees to successfully execute the
incident response plan and limit the amount of damage inflicted by a threat
actor. Testing each level of these plans, especially the "small details," is
critical for successful execution of the organization's strategy. It allows
leadership to adapt their playbooks and runbooks to various situations and
circumstances, and evolve their pre-crisis plans to account for emerging threats
and their effects on the business.

Conducting tabletop exercises, creating and testing playbooks and runbooks, and
putting employees through real-life simulations during war games fosters a
well-coordinated response and puts teams in the best position for when (not if)
a situation arises. These operations can reveal potential gaps and answer
questions that include: How is the company communicating to its employees when
the email platform is compromised? Who is managing that list of employees and
their corresponding contact information? Where is that document stored and when
was it last updated? The responses to these questions are a direct correlation
to a company's maturity and preparation.

When a corporation finds itself in the middle of a cyber crisis, the key
stakeholders will shift their focus to the executive leadership team to
determine how well they are responding. During these times, it is imperative for
executives and board members to understand who their top allies are, and how to
best leverage them to successfully navigate the situation and minimize the
financial and reputational harm caused by the breach.

Read more about:

CISO Corner



ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chris Crummey

Director, Executive & Board Cyber Services, Sygnia

Chris Crummey is the Director for Executive and Board Cyber Services globally at
Sygnia. For the past eight years, Chris has prepared and advised thousands of
companies, SOCs, executives and Boards of Directors on cybersecurity best
practices before, during and after a cybersecurity crisis. These best practices
focus on the intersection of cybersecurity, risk-based decision making, crisis
communications, leadership under pressure and the role human beings play in
cybersecurity. As a keynote speaker on these topics, Chris is also a
cybersecurity faculty member of “Competent Boards,” which is the original and
premier creator of online of ESG training programs for board directors and
senior business professionals. Prior to this role, Chris was the Executive
Director for the IBM’s X-Force Command Centers globally and specialized in
tabletop exercises and cyber wargames.

See more from Chris Crummey
Keep up with the latest cybersecurity threats, newly discovered vulnerabilities,
data breach information, and emerging trends. Delivered daily or weekly right to
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