TECHNOLOGY
What’s your cyber attack game plan? By Scott Nursten, CEO, ITHQ
IT CONTINUITY MANAGEMENT
Drill your teams to fight more than fire When a well-known UK business was hacked with ransomware, it took them 17 days to issue a press release. How can they have been so unprepared for this increasingly common scenario? The answer lies in a flawed view of how IT continuity should be managed and tested. Models for business continuity and disaster recovery follow the good old-fashioned fire drill. An alarm is triggered, a building is evacuated, critical systems are isolated and everyone participates. The standard protocol remains the same, regardless of how the fire started. Overcoming potential damage is not even considered as part of the drill. IT continuity management requires a different drill because unlike natural disasters like fire and flood, the nature of threats to IT networks and data assets keep changing. This unpredictability requires a different approach to disaster preparation that builds a library of responses.
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WHY YOUR BCP AND DR MODEL DOES NOT WORK FOR IT CONTINUITY
BCP and DR were the stuff of thought leadership articles in the ‘90s. It has taken over 20 years for best practice to become commonplace, but threats have moved on. These models prepare you for a disruption to IT function caused by natural disaster but were never designed to help you prepare for a cyber attack. IT continuity testing is part of your cyber resilience strategy, aiming to ensure your business can anticipate,
Businesses almost ❛❛ invariably believe they
are better prepared for a cyberattack than they are, yet they are reluctant to test the resiliency of their IT continuity plans ❜❜
withstand, recover, and evolve from an advanced, sustained attack. Testing your resilience to advanced threats means thinking up worst-case realworld scenarios and playing them out.
ARE YOU PREPARED TO TACKLE 1,500 SIMULTANEOUS FIRES?
Ransomware is a classic example of how ill-prepared most businesses are for shifting modern threats. Ransomware was relatively rare until 2011, when it really took off. Then, according to a McAfee Labs Threats Report, cases leapt from 100,000 in 2014 to 720,000 in 2015. Since then, both frequency and cost of attacks have increased. When Kaseya was hit by a supply chain ransomware attack, it impacted 1,500 businesses at once – and IBM puts the average cost of a corporate breach today at $3.86 million. In terms of recovery, paying the ransom is only the start. There is no guarantee
