Pre-Empting a Crisis: Planning Your Cybersecurity Incident Response - FTI Consulting

Pre-Empting a Crisis: Planning Your Cybersecurity Incident Response As we navigate an increasingly digital world, businesses must stay proactive in safeguarding their systems and data. FTI Consulting experts ​Wouter Veugelen, Ben Hamilton and Michael Khoury explore how organisations should remain alert and prepare to respond to a potential cyber crisis. SHARE Data breaches and cyber incidents have become a reality of modern business. Organisations must be proactive by establishing a well-defined response plan and training incident responders before an incident occurs. Having an Incident Response Plan Is a Critical First Step An incident response plan should outline the internal stakeholders required to participate and provide input when responding to a cyber incident, including representatives from legal, HR, communications, IT, security operations as well as the CIO and CISO. The plan should also identify key external advisors to guide you during an incident, covering communication, data privacy, and legal matters. The Most Crisis-Ready Organisations Routinely Test Their Incident Response Plans You can effectively test your incident response plan through tabletop exercises and simulations. These sessions bring together relevant stakeholders from across the organisation to practice how they would respond to a breach in a real-life scenario. Additionally, regular phishing simulations help train staff to recognise and avoid phishing attempts. It's crucial that your responders don’t open the plan for the first time during a full-scale incident, which is why conducting cyber breach simulations is essential. These sessions create a safe environment for incident responders to engage with the plan, identify knowledge gaps, and address those gaps before an actual incident occurs. Document and Test Your Organisation’s Systems Vulnerable to a Cyber Breach The number of systems potentially affected by a cyber breach is increasing rapidly, including cloud platforms, online collaboration tools, messaging apps, and evidence repositories that hold highly sensitive information. To enhance your cyber preparedness and minimise risk, you should: develop a comprehensive plan that identifies and documents all of your organisation’s systems vulnerable to breaches conduct regular security testing of these systems to identify vulnerabilities that could expose them to external threats. FTI Consulting can support your cybersecurity incident response at every step. Find out more here. Watch Our Cybersecurity Video Series Following a Crisis: Remediating Your Cybersecurity Incident Response Watch Video Handling a Crisis: Managing Your Cybersecurity Incident Response Watch Video Related Information Cybersecurity Consulting & Data Privacy Advisory Digital Forensics Consulting Services Information Governance, Privacy & Security Consulting Published October 23, 2024 Key Contacts Wouter Veugelen Senior Managing Director, Head of Australia Cybersecurity Ben Hamilton Senior Managing Director Michael Khoury Senior Managing Director, Head of Australia Technology Most Popular Insights Hybrid Energy Strategies for Data Centers Expose Complex Constraints Venezuela’s Oil Sector Recovery: Navigating the Post-Maduro Investment Landscape How the War on Iran Is Reshaping Transportation & Logistics Four Predictions for Private Equity in 2026 Global CFO Survey 2026 We use cookies to provide website functionality, to analyse our traffic, to personalise content and to enable social media functionality. This includes cookies which are set by third parties which allow us to execute marketing campaigns and manage our relationship with you. For further information, please see ourCookie Policy Manage Settings Accept