Master Your Security Incident Response Communications Program

Our Advice

Critical Insight

• There’s no such thing as successful incident response communications; strive instead for effective communications. There will always be some fallout after a security incident, but it can be effectively mitigated through honesty, transparency, and accountability.
• Effective external communications begin with effective internal communications. Security Incident Response Team members come from departments that don’t usually work closely with each other. This means they often have different ways of thinking and speaking about issues. Be sure they are familiar with each other before a crisis occurs.
• You won’t save face by withholding embarrassing details. Lying only makes a bad situation worse, but coming clean and acknowledging shortcomings (and how you’ve fixed them) can go a long way towards restoring stakeholders’ trust.

Impact and Result

• Effective and efficient management of security incidents involves a formal process of preparation, detection, analysis, containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident activities: communications must be integrated into each of these phases.
• Understand that prior planning helps to take the guesswork out of incident response communications. By preparing for several different types of security incidents, the communications team will get used to working with each other, as well as learning what strategies are and are not effective. Remember, the communications team contains diverse members from various departments, and each may have different ideas about what information is important to release.