The First Step Following a Security Breach? Establish Secure Communications
Every day security breaches are publicized in the media. Hackers don’t seem to discriminate between different sized organizations or various industries. Regardless of whether an organization is large or small, whether it’s a government organization or financial, legal, healthcare or retail establishment, security breaches occur regularly.
When an organization discovers it has been hacked, the natural first steps are to communicate with various important stakeholders to start getting their arms around the incident and begin the process of remediating it technically and beyond.
A proper response to any cyber incident includes the following stakeholders:
- Cybersecurity team
- Outside incident response team
- CIO, CSO, CISO
- Business executive management (CEO, CFO, COO)
- General Counsel
- Outside counsel
- The Board of Directors
- Public Relations and media communications firm
Assembling this cross functional and inter-organizational team is the only way to ensure a well-developed and executed incident response strategy following the breach.
Frequently however, when an organization discovers a breach, and begins the incident response, the hackers are still inside the network. Systems are shut down and employees are reduced to pen and paper in an effort to shut the hacker out from gaining any additional information. Communications between these stakeholders becomes difficult if not impossible.
The only way to ensure secure communication across the stakeholders, is by not relying on traditional corporate communications since they may be compromised. If your organization is “owned,” any communications whether email, phone calls, cell phone calls or text messages may be intercepted by the hackers, providing them with valuable intelligence about your response strategy and tactics.
Moreover, traditional communications do not enable secure inter-organizational teams.
The only approach in these situations is to use an easy to use and readily available “out of band” secure communications solution that supports inter-organizational communities of interest.
Security Breach Incident Response Secure Communications
KoolSpan’s TrustCall provides secure communications, between communities of interest; including cross-functional and inter-organizational teams. It is not only secure, but also readily available and easy-to-use. TrustCall secures mobile communications including phone calls and text messages, enabling stake holders to speak and send messages even when the network is infected.
For more information, download the data sheet, or contact KoolSpan.
