Do you have a cyber security response plan?

16th July 2025

If not, you need one: but how should you go about making it?

Planning makes everything easier. The more prepared you are for something, the more straightforward it will be to accomplish. As the saying goes fail to prepare / prepare to fail, and the same can apply to cyber security incidents.

Should a breach occur, you need to be ready to respond immediately, with a detailed plan of how to mitigate damage and get your systems back up and running as quickly as possible. While the exact plan will vary depending on who you are, the stages needed remain the same – take a look:

Assemble your response team: this should include key personnel from IT/Security, Legal, Communications/PR, HR (if an insider threat is possible) and Leadership. Everyone should know exactly what their role is, from those needed to actively fix the problem to staff needed to communicate with customers.

Define your incident: break it down into incident type – so malware, data breach, DDoS, etc – and create a classification system based on outcomes (so low, medium or high severity).

Develop a workflow: ensure every department is prepared, that detection and analysis is active and that you have containment procedures in place to isolate vulnerable systems. Next, eradicating the issue should be priority, followed by recovery and post incident review.

Document everything: you can’t be expected to remember every element of your plan – be sure to have it typed and stored some, preferably on paper, as your computer systems may be down. This document should also have contact details for key personnel, checklists for each phase and legal requirements.

Update: once you have the plan in place, run fake responses so you can spot any weaknesses. Iterate and improve until you have the perfect plan, ready to go if the worst should happen.

If you need any help creating a cyber security response plan, talk to Interfuture Security: we can help!

YouTube: https://youtu.be/sy9hLQOOIYc