An Incident Response plan provides your team with a roadmap on how to proactively protect your data. Complying with regulations is also important when dealing with sensitive data.
If a data breach occurs, you need to know how to deal with that situation and establish what data has been compromised quickly.
A report done on Cyber Security in Local Government 15 Western Australian LG entities manage cyber security risks and respond to cyber threats effectively. Appropriate management and response make it harder for cybercriminals to infiltrate LG entity networks to disrupt and compromise the confidentiality, integrity and availability of their systems and information.
The report documented that twelve Local Government entities did not respond to vulnerabilities In a timely manner. Specifically, they were unable to identify and assess cyber risks to systems and implement appropriate plans to address them. LG entities’ key IT systems and services being servery impacted and affecting business operations.
“We found that only 3 audited LG entities had a process to manage vulnerabilities and none of these were fully effective. We expected LG entities to have timely processes to address vulnerabilities.” (Page 9 of Cyber Security in Local Government)
When reputation, revenue, and customer trust is at stake, it’s critical that an organisation can identify and respond to security incidents and events. Whether a breach is small or large, organisations need to have an incident response plan in place to mitigate the risks of being a victim of the latest cyber-attack.
The Australian Cyber Security Centre has created a list to assist organisation’s initial assessment of its readiness to respond to cyber security incidents. Organisations can tailor the checklist to include additional readiness activities relevant to their organisations.
Preparing to Respond to Cyber Security Incidents
Organisations should ask themselves the following questions to determine how prepared they are to respond to cyber security incidents:
- Have we identified systems and data critical to our business operations?
- Do we have business continuity and disaster recovery plans?
- Do we have an up‐to‐date and regularly tested incident response plan?
- Do our agreements with service providers include cyber security incident reporting and response activities?
- Do we have the ability to detect when cyber security incidents may have occurred?
- How easily and quickly can we access appropriate resources to respond to cyber security incidents?
- What are our legislative obligations in regard to reporting cyber security incidents?
- Do we have a public communications plan in case of cyber security incidents?
Prevention is Better Than a Cure
Find out more on how you can work towards creating a comprehensive incident maturity assessment with managed IT, an Australian Cyber Security Centre partner.
