Building capability and community through cyber-incident response exercises

Abstract

While a natural disaster or related threat may impact an organisation at some point, it is more likely (even inevitable) that it will be the victim of a cyber attack. The solution to being better prepared for these imminent attacks is to undertake more lightweight and frequent incident response (IR) exercises to help build capabilities and community through a tighter, recurring cycle of planning, conducting and assessing. To boost the facilitation of IR exercises, organisations must leverage the established relationships between business continuity management (BCM) or resilience staff (both of which are familiar with business continuity and disaster recovery exercises), and their information security office. As BCM will ultimately be involved in response and recovery after a cyber attack, it is intuitively more effective to collaborate with BCM in advance. Indeed, it has been substantiated that BCM engagement improves incident response time and reduces incident response costs. This paper concludes that involving BCM or resilience departments in IR exercises contributes to more effective responses to actual incidents.