Is your Cyber Disaster Recovery Plan equipped to handle the latest cyber threats?

The expansion of the connected ecosystem is contributing to the complexity and growth of cyberattacks. According to Cybersecurity Ventures estimation, the human attack surface will grow to 6 billion by 2021 and the attacks will cost the global economy $6tn by 2021. Those who have experienced high profile cyberattacks have suffered devastating financial loss, reputational damage, and many legal suits. To avoid these consequences, businesses must have cybersecurity in place as a defense from cybercriminals. But despite all the necessary security measures, human errors and technical faults render the security mechanism useless creating the necessity for a disaster recovery plan.

The policies and procedures of a disaster recovery operates during and after the disaster, enabling businesses to recover important assets that they have lost in the crisis. Importantly, the disaster recovery plan shall be in accordance with the threats so that the management can continue to operate business even after an attack.

They’re too big to fail. Are you too small to recover?

Aligning your disaster recovery plan to cyber threats

1. Awareness of threats

Companies should develop a contextual understanding of threats to prevent and handle breaches. Pairing human capital with big data analytics may develop this understanding. With the regulations like GDPR, the key challenge for businesses is to shift the breach time to detection time. Companies can protect against the breaches by considering an approach that recognizes the context and intent of user behavior at an early stage and flags-off potential threats proactively. The understanding of users’ behavior with systems and data also determines the risk factor.

2. Responding to attacks

To respond to attacks profoundly, it is vital for businesses to have tools and processes that can handle and respond to sophisticated cyberattacks. Being one step ahead from the effects of the attacks and the destruction that the cyber attackers may cause, is the only solution from avoiding becoming a victim of them. A better understanding of the data, accessibility, and human error leading to malicious acts, compliance with the GDPR regulations and protects sensitive information in the network. A process should be laid to identify and monitor potential threats on an hourly basis. The identification process embeds checkpoints into the security landscape to build stronger efficiency in analyzing behavior changes that could result in breach possibly. By analyzing the movement of data and behavior of the network, the team can ensure that the threat has been mitigated and they must move to the next step of protecting data, brand, and customers.

3. Continuous planning is significant

Businesses must consider disaster recovery as an evolving plan due to the constantly changing cybersecurity landscape. The security team should not be under an impression that the previous year’s policy /plan can be implemented this year too. The information collected by being vigilant and performing risk assessments regularly, a perfect security plan can be framed. A disaster recovery plan formed based on real observation can only ensure that the landscape is free of vulnerabilities.

4. Approach should evolve

A disaster recovery plan cannot be developed on the basis of traditional approaches. It needs time and effort as it is challenging to create and implement security measures. The traditional risks like an epidemic, terrorism, etc. can be adjoined together as they create the same impact. All cyber incidents are not similar and simple. When the data is encrypted and locked, restoring data from a backup source before ransomware spreads further takes time and involves a significant data loss too.

Source: eccouncil.org