Your business has been hacked. Now what?

Here’s the thing, your business has just been hacked. The alarms have sounded and it is, what we would call, bad news all round. But just because your business has been subjected to a cyber attack, it doesn’t have to spell the end for your business.

We’ve all read blogs on protection against hacking crimes and how to better protect yourself and your business from cyber attacks and data breaches, but what you probably don’t know about is security recovery plans. Having a recovery plan in place is incredibly important, though, because it is the very thing that will limit the damage occurred and make the process less expensive.

Here is what should you do when your business has been hacked:

Get To The Bottom of The Attack

In order to respond with maximum effectiveness, you are going to need to get a detailed understanding of exactly what occurred. This means finding out how the hackers got into your system, which areas of your network were compromised, which data may have been nicked and who else may have been affected by the whole thing. This can be a lengthy process. If you want to wrap things up quickly, then we recommend you get onto the phone to the local state police computer crimes department and have them complete a thorough analysis of what happened.

Get On The Phone To Your Lawyer

If you’ve planned ahead and put a specific strategy in place then your insurance may provide a specialist attorney and cover the costs. If not, you need to hire one as soon as humanly possible. The reason for this is, you have a responsibility to your clients and customers, as well as an urgent need to protect yourself. One of the things the law requires you to do is notify anyone that may have had information about them stolen in an attack, so make sure you fullfill your legal obligations.

Be As Transparent As Possible

Your reputation is now on the line and so the way in which you now handle the situation is going to have a huge affect on your company’s future. As such, make sure you are as open, honest and detailed as possible with those who may have been affected by the hack. This means employees, contractors, suppliers, clients and customers. This means telling them what happened and what you are doing to solve the problem. The cost of rebuilding a reputation, coupled with the monetary losses suffered, could cripple you, so make sure you concentrate on maintaining the relationships you have built.

Focus On The Problem At Hand

When it comes to limiting the cost of the damage done, you are going to need to act quickly and accept the costs incurred. This means getting rid of the infected computers, shutting down your network, restoring your data with clean backups, reformatting certain systems so they secure or starting afresh. You may also have to work with IT support companies and software manufacturers to patch the flaw that allowed hackers in to start with. Wherever they got in to make sure you rebuild bigger, better and stronger than before.

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