Crisis preparedness for cyberattack and data breach

Crisis preparedness for cyberattack and data breach

It could be a tweet from a blogger, a call from a regulator, or a YouTube video posted by a hacker collective: the first you know about a serious data incident affecting your organisation could come from anywhere. And from that point, it’s a scramble to mobilise the team you’ll need to investigate, patch, report and communicate about the incident.

Some of the world’s largest brands have struggled to respond effectively, communicating with clarity and empathy to customers and stakeholders alongside managing an operational investigation.

Information security and cyber issues present a uniquely technical and urgent test of your crisis preparedness, with facts hard to come by for hours or days and instant customer alarm as they fear identity theft, phishing or worse. As regulators get increasingly active and the penalties for data breach grow, it’s crucial to have your response well-planned and tested so you’re ready to manage stakeholder expectations effectively.

We’ve worked with clients around the world to align their IT, operations, legal and communications functions to be better equipped to deal with cyberattacks, data loss, or breach situations.

Cyberattack and data breach simulation exercises

Social Simulator creates an environment that looks, feels and responds like a real world event. Your team will face incoming social media, phone calls, emails and media articles and need to assign roles and develop an appropriate response.

From an adjoining room or off-site, our team will run the exercise platform, adapting the script intelligently real-time to put the team under the right amount of pressure.

Our simulations are designed with you to ensure a realistic and convincing scenario. We’ll ensure technical details match your operational reality, so the situation reports and data samples have that crucial credibility.

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Developing cyber awareness and preparedness

For larger teams, organisations still developing their cyber incident plans, or colleagues with perhaps less experience in social media, we offer facilitated workshop sessions using our Crisis90 training platform.

It helps groups of colleagues work through a scenario and compare their responses in as little as 90 minutes.

Teams work through a series of injects – internal emails, reports from bloggers, comments from customers on the organisation’s social media channels – and discuss their approach:

  • what should our handling strategy be?
  • how could this scenario develop or escalate – should we be reactive or proactive?
  • what messages do we need to develop for our key audiences?
  • how should we adapt messaging for media, regulators, social media and customer communications?

We bring this all to life with a cutting-edge digital platform which gets a room buzzing as groups compare and contrast their strategies and tactics, and engage with a social media feed in real time.

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Experience a sample broadcast media inject from a cyber security incident management exercise run by Social Simulator:

Our thinking: restoring trust after a data breach

There’s no avoiding the fact a major cyber security incident is going to lead to a difficult few weeks for the organisation, but showing humanity and responsiveness though corporate channels could make the difference between retaining loyal customers and suffering a mass exodus and earning the wrong kind of reputation for security and competence.

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