How to Prepare For & Survive a Cyber Attack: Critical Steps to Follow

In the digital age, where information is power, cybercriminals loom like shadowy adversaries, ready to pounce on unsuspecting organizations. These stealthy assailants are relentless, exploiting every vulnerability to breach digital fortresses, wreak havoc and compromise the integrity of business-critical data. In the ever-evolving landscape of cyber warfare, organizations must be fully equipped, prepared for the subduing incursion, and swift in their response to emerge victorious.

This strategic guide unfolds in three critical phases: Preparation, Engagement, and Triumph — each vital to business continuity.

How to Prepare for a Cyberattack

Before any battle, you will want to have as many allies and resources on your side as possible but knowing where to find accurate and helpful information can be difficult. In this case, the best place to start is with your vendors to ensure you are following the best practices to mitigate attacks and recover faster. Many vendors have guides for hardening and recovery of data.

1. Identify Critical Assets and Risks

Before you can implement any cybersecurity plan, you need to know your network and resources inside and out. Many companies fall victim to attacks from exploits in software that the security staff were unaware of and missed critical security patches. Take a full inventory of every machine or device and all of the software running on them.

Once you’ve fully documented your organization’s digital assets and identified key areas to harden, and monitor, you can move on to the next step.

2. Developing a Cybersecurity Plan

It is impossible to plan for and mitigate every cyberattack that can occur but you can assess your environment and develop a set of contingencies. A cybersecurity plan is where a company will list these contingencies and should cover several key areas including:

Risk management
Ransomware defense
Training and security awareness
Penetration testing
Intrusion detection
Incident response
Risk tolerance

Consider how to protect yourself against both technical vulnerabilities and human error. Decide on measures to help you protect your systems such as, intrusion detection/data exfiltration tools, malware detection, and other tooling. In addition, prepare an incident response plan, provide cybersecurity training to your employees and consider how you’ll test these measures, and how you’ll respond to cybersecurity incidents. It is also important to include potential security risks that have been written off as acceptable risks with no mitigation steps. Risks that have no mitigation could potentially increase in severity as the cybersecurity landscape changes in the world and should be noted.

Review this plan regularly, to ensure it’s still relevant and correct if you add new hardware, software to your infrastructure, or security best practices evolve.

3. Implementing Security Measures

Once you’ve got a security framework in place, it’s time to get down to the details. Keep in mind that any security strategy is useful only if it’s followed. For example, there’s no sense in having a strict password policy if people just write their passwords on a Post-it note and leave it on their desk. When developing cybersecurity plans it is always important to consider the human element and treat this as a balance. The CIA (Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability) framework demonstrates this well. Data can remain intact and be kept in a safe place, but if users who need that data to keep business running lose access, business will halt.

Before implementing new security measures, evaluate the existing ones and bring in stakeholders to test the new systems and provide feedback. Simple tweaks such as choosing an easy-to-use VPN client or offering passkeys instead of passwords could greatly improve your organization’s security. It is also important to keep in mind environmental changes in the business that might already have users overloaded (like product launches and heavy vacation seasons) before making big security changes that will impact users workflow.

As part of your security measures, consider including:

Multi-factor authentication
Strong password policies
Software update / patching policies
Remote administration/wiping options for portable devices
Encryption requirements for data stored on any device
Firewall and antivirus software
Precautions such as disabling USB ports/locking down user accounts
Incident response plan and expert incident response
Backup and recovery platform and policies

4. Training and Awareness

Everyone in the organization has a role to play when it comes to cybersecurity. It is important to provide training for people at all levels to help them understand the reason behind the precautions you’re implementing. People are more likely to take security precautions seriously if they understand the reasoning behind them.

Educate users about the different methods of phishing that attackers might use, and strategies such as MFA fatigue attacks. Teach staff members, especially team leaders and managers, to not request login credentials or use unofficial channels to ask their team members to do things.

Perform simulated phishing attacks or other security exercises, and require extra training to people who fall for the attacks.

5. Backup and Recovery Planning

Regular backups play a critical role in any cybersecurity policy and should already be a part of your data protection plan. Backup best practice says to follow the 3-2-1 rule: take three different backups, on two different media, with at least one of those backups being off-site and ideally in immutable storage. In addition make sure the backups are encrypted and tested for integrity.

Untested backups are unconfirmed contingences. Have a disaster recovery plan in place and information on how long it would take to implement that plan if the worst were to happen.

6. Regularly Scheduled Audits and Drills

Finally, test your plans thoroughly. Bring in a third-party service to test your security and perform penetration testing can provide an unbiased test on how your business would recover in a disaster. They can act as a fresh pair of eyes and may see things you hadn’t thought of.

When testing, test everything, including recovering from an attack using your backups and offsite copies. Is everything you need available from the backups? Were you able to get up and running as quickly as you thought? How quickly did your intrusion detection system alert you to an attack? Evaluate the results and make any necessary improvements.

How to Survive a Cyberattack

In the midst of an attack, time is everything in terms of damage, halted operations, likelihood of recovery, and lost revenue. The key to early detection is good infrastructure monitoring and reporting. Creating the most effective monitoring plan with clear and defined criticality levels, alert chains to the proper stakeholders, and tailored thresholds to mitigate alert fatigue can be the difference between early detection and a missed attack.

Enabling Containment Strategies

When the alarm bells ring, swift action is your primary defense. The top priority is to cut off the affected system, either by physically unplugging network cables, powering off machines, or terminating account access. If there is any doubt if a component is affected or not, take the safe route and terminate the access.

Eradication and Recovery

When recovering from an attack it can be a struggle to choose between saving data and risking reinfection to the environment, it is always better to err on the side of caution when recovering. After isolating the affected devices, either use anti-virus tools to remove the malicious software, or restore a known-good image of the device from a backup. Seek advice from security professionals to determine how the machine(s) were infected. Cyberattack specialists can often help determine whether there are any vulnerabilities or misconfigurations that must be fixed before using or connecting those machines to the internet once again. Quarantine, sandboxing, or test environments are a good practice to verify full recovery without reinfection, prior to go back to production.

Heightened Communication

Take the time to inform stakeholders not just about the initial attack but also when there are critical changes in the process and to business continuity timelines. When managing different stakeholders like management, legal, or PR make sure to follow written procedure and policies. For example, if you have reason to believe an attacker has accessed a customer or employee database, the legal team needs to be informed immediately to contact those individuals about the breach and the nature of the data the attacker may have access to within regulation and compliance thresholds.

Depending on the regions your business operates in, you may be obliged to inform a regulatory body or law enforcement authorities. Work with your Public Relations and legal team to draft an email or announcement.

Post-Attack Analysis

Once the immediate crisis is over, take some time to perform a postmortem. The purpose of this is not to assign blame, but rather to identify lessons to be learned. Consider what happened, how it happened, how the recovery process went, and what you could do better in the future to prevent the same issue from happening again. Attacks vary widely and it is impossible to protect against every possible scenario but this process can help determine if the current controls still meet the companies acceptable risk threshold.

Secure Your Data From Cyberattacks With Veeam

Cyberthreats are increasing both in frequency and complexity. The time to start taking precautions is now. Implement these strategies to safeguard your digital infrastructure. For more statistics on cyberattacks check out the 2024 Ransomware Trends Report detailing lessons learned from 1,200 survey respondents.

Veeam Cyber Secure offers the necessary services, expert incident response and ransomware recovery warranty to protect you before, during, and after a cyberattack. To learn more about Veeam and how our solutions can improve your cybersecurity, contact us today to request a free trial.