Disaster response plans are well-established in most industries. They may include procedures for maintaining or restoring normal operations interrupted by extreme weather, energy blackouts or breaks in the chain of command. It is vital that companies include potential cyber breaches in their business continuity or disaster response plans.

Despite the prevalence of disaster response planning, many businesses remain ill‑prepared to manage a cyber incident. According to one survey, while cybersecurity is widely recognized as a business priority, a meaningful gap remains between awareness and operational readiness, leaving many organizations without fully mature incident detection and response capabilities in practice.¹ This lack of preparedness contributes to escalating financial impact: Reported cybercrime losses in the United States exceeded $20 billion in 2025, continuing a sharp upward trend, according to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).²

Criminals are increasingly targeting specific types of businesses by exploiting human behavior through social engineering tactics, rather than relying solely on technical weaknesses. Since these attacks often begin with employee interactions, response plans should account for the role employees play in early detection and escalation. Training employees to recognize and promptly report suspicious activity can significantly reduce response time and limit downstream impact.

No organization should assume it can deflect every cybercrime attempt. Response plans that map out communications and recovery processes after a cyber incident are essential to restoring operations. As business operations become increasingly digitized and complex, criminals are developing new tactics that exploit these changes.

While each company’s response plan will be unique, here are some guiding principles for an effective plan.

Preparation is key

Cyber incident response plans depend on an accurate visualization of the company landscape and areas that would be most vulnerable in different situations. Businesses should also establish clear command structures and communication protocols. In addition, organizations should prioritize critical data and systems with formalized agreements with outside experts, such as legal counsel or cyber recovery specialists. They should also determine which decision makers should have access to the response plan, potentially including external stakeholders like vendors, customers or banks.

As attacks accelerate, organizations face shrinking windows to detect and respond, making clearly defined roles, rapid decision‑making and pre‑established escalation paths more critical than ever. Playbooks detailing the response should be provided to all stakeholders, ideally in hard copy or secure offline repositories, in case digital systems are compromised. Many cyber incidents are exacerbated when company leaders are unable to consult playbooks or contact decision makers through alternate communication channels.

Response plans should not be static, and they require regular updates, especially if a company has weathered a cyber incident. Post-incident forensics provide opportunities to review the effectiveness of a company’s response. They can also help uncover how and where cybercriminals were able to breach its systems. Moreover, criminals often re-target a company after one successful breach, which makes the review and revision process particularly important.

Detect the breach and contain the damage

Many cyber incidents begin with compromised identity credentials rather than system failures, enabling attackers to log in as legitimate users and move laterally before traditional defenses detect anomalous behavior. Rapid responses that identify and isolate affected users, devices or network segments can greatly reduce the scope of the damage.

The speed of a response can hinge on how robust an organization’s alerting and monitoring capabilities are, including security information and event management tools that can surface anomalous behavior as it occurs. When an actual incident is underway, security personnel need to determine what parts of the network are affected and which can still be protected from criminal activity. If a breach is serious and insufficiently contained, the organization must be ready to pivot quickly to damage control.

Rely on strong communication protocols

The effectiveness of internal and external communication — or lack thereof — will likely determine the overall success of the response to the incident and the severity of the fallout. Company decision makers and employees, external stakeholders and independent experts must be accessible through uncompromised communication channels. The organization’s legal and compliance teams may be especially critical participants, since they can help make sure remedial steps are not violating any regulations or laws. 

All stakeholders need regular updates but keeping them looped in when primary communications are suspended or compromised can be a challenge.

A simple — and cost-effective — solution can be the maintenance of call trees that log additional contact information for every response team member. If normal methods of communication, such as company email or devices, are impacted, organizations should identify alternative methods of communication. These may include non‑company email accounts, secure or encrypted messaging platforms or hardware reserved specifically for incident response situations. An alert system that operates on a channel not tied to any normal organization networks can also enable effective response.

As companies depend on widening ecosystems of partner organizations, vendors, service providers and customers, effective communication protocols also must extend to the outside world. Response plans should include alternate methods of communicating with law enforcement, banks and all types of third parties, and contain guidance on messaging that concisely describes an incident without revealing sensitive information or engaging in speculation about the nature of the event.

Remediate with forensics in mind and restore systems and data

Once the cybercriminal has been eradicated from the environment and all identified issues have been remediated, company operations may be restored. Simultaneously, a thorough report on the incident, including an assessment of gaps identified in the response process and any lessons learned, should be created and reviewed. An incident report informed by high‑quality forensics can help identify the initial attack vector and any methods of persistence, enabling organizations to prevent recurrence and diminish future threats.

If data has been lost or compromised, backups and restoration are also critical, especially if any third-party assets have been affected. The primary objectives of incident response are to contain the threat, eradicate it and recover affected systems to resume normal operations. Forensics conducted during an incident can also provide insight into improving how critical company data is stored and protected.

Ultimately, recovery is incomplete if it does not bolster the organization’s future preparedness. While cyber incidents may be impossible to stop, the most effective companies will learn from their mistakes and use them to make their response plans even stronger.

The following actions can help most organizations future proof new or existing response plans:

• Map and identify all aspects of company systems
• Establish protocols for breach response
• Develop a communication plan that includes contact information for law enforcement or external professional services
• List all key vendors and any services needed to restore operations
• Include forensic auditing processes
• Test the response plan regularly, using a variety of incident scenarios

¹ Source: CompTIA, State of Cybersecurity 2025. https://www.comptia.org/en-us/resources/research/state-of-cybersecurity/

² Source: FBI, 2025 Internet Crime Report (IC3). https://www.ic3.gov/AnnualReport/Reports/2025_IC3Report.pdf