Being prepared with legal, insurance, and IT considerations are critical for organizations navigating the complexities of incident response.
Legal preparation is a crucial component of an incident response plan, as it involves navigating numerous complexities that require compliance. The first step is to secure a breach coach who can lead your incident response efforts effectively.
The Role of a Breach Coach
A breach coach acts as the quarterback during an incident, coordinating communication and actions among various teams, including security, IT, crisis communication, and management.
Breach Coach:
- Attorney-client privilege/attorney work product doctrine
- Quarterback incident response
- Ensure statutory, regulatory, and contractual compliance
- Mitigate and defend against class-action litigation
Navigating Compliance Obligations
Beyond regulatory requirements, many organizations often overlook the contractual obligations tied to data breaches. Customers, partners, and vendors increasingly demand timely notification if their data is compromised.
Review contracts and uncover your liabilities
- Statutory
- Regulatory
- Contractual
The Role of Insurance in Incident Response
When crafting your IRP, it’s crucial to consider your insurance coverage. Cyber insurance policies have become increasingly complex, covering both first-party and third-party risks.
Get your incident response vendors (and their services) approved by your insurance ahead of time!
- If your vendor is not pre-approved, broker will submit approval to carrier
- If you don’t get them approved, their services may not be covered
Understand your coverage
- Read your prep document to understand limits, list of service providers, etc.
Add insurance to your response plan
- When do you engage insurance and who do you notify
- Walk through incident response plan with your insurance
IT Preparation and Business Continuity
A solid incident response plan also requires thorough IT preparation. Organizations should maintain a clear understanding of where their data resides and the workflows essential to their operations.
Know your business workflows and how IT supports them
- Understand what your mission-critical IT systems are
- Know where your critical data lives
Get the standard tools to protect your critical systems and data
- Immutable (ransomware protection) backups
- Detection tools – MDR, SIEM, SOC
- Conditional Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Create a technical response plan
Moreover, having a business continuity plan in place is vital. This ensures that essential workflows continue even when faced with disruptions. Integrating the insurance process into tabletop exercises will ensure that your team is prepared for all aspects of incident response.
This proactive approach will help mitigate risks and ensure that your organization can respond swiftly and efficiently to any cybersecurity challenge.
Create Your First Real Security Incident Response Plan
Watch the full webinar to learn how to make a real security incident response plan in just 1 hour. No, we’re not talking about a pretend plan that only serves as a CYA for insurance – we’re talking about a step-by-step plan that you can rely on in a crisis.