If the technology your business depends on goes down, how do you respond? The effects of an extended cyber business interruption can be far-reaching. An immediate financial impact is often felt, but long-term business viability and competitiveness are also at risk.

With such high stakes, It’s important to have a plan. Here’s what to know, including an overview of cyber business interruption risks and the keys to making a plan.

What Is a Cyber Business Interruption?

A business interruption is an event that prevents a business from being able to operate normally for a period of time, whether those regular operations are manufacturing products, selling merchandise or providing services. The interruption can be a complete work stoppage or a reduction in typical capacity, and may last days, weeks or months.

During this time of reduced or halted business operations, income and revenue can drop — potentially to zero, while day-to-day expenses continue to add up, and may even increase. Fires, floods, windstorms and other natural disasters, along with thefts and vandalism are all examples of events that may cause a business interruption.

In contrast, a cyber business interruption is a business interruption event where the manufacturing of products, selling of merchandise or provision of services is prevented by a cyber event. Data breaches and ransomware attacks are the most common inhouse events, but third-party technology outages can also cause an interruption. Like non-cyber interruptions, these events cause full or partial work stoppages, revenue drops and potentially increased expenses over the days, weeks or months it takes a business to recover.

Interruption Categories and Examples

When it comes to cyber business interruptions, a wide range of events is possible, from minor inconveniences to the level of a severe, organization-wide crisis. Each event requires a response proportional to its severity, so understanding what an event could look like is a good first step. The following categories show the range of severity possible, with the general types of events each may contain.

• Low-level events are common and include both expected and unexpected events. Think an unauthorized user login attempt or the interruption of a network’s VPN services. These events are often quickly logged and forgotten, though some may warrant continuing monitoring.
• Medium-level events — hours-long operational disruptions, key system outages, continued unauthorized login attempts — are more serious, but don’t require an organization-wide response, as long as they’re addressed in a timely manner. IT and security teams routinely handle them.
• High-level events are where an operational or financial impact on an organization begins to be felt. These can include key system or operational disruptions that last hours to days and injuries to employees. If not addressed immediately, the stakes rise and the survivability of the organization is at risk.
• Critical-level events are rare but serious. Examples include an operational disruption lasting longer than 72 hours or a serious injury or loss of life affecting one or more employees. Serious employee impacts, challenges conducting operations and financial damages are likely.

How to Plan for Technology Disruption?

The important role technology plays in business cannot be understated. Offices rely on the internet, videoconferencing, accounting, project management and more. Meanwhile their suppliers and vendors do, too. Proprietary and third-party software runs machines necessary to supply goods and services, meet contract obligations and more.

Most businesses recognize that unplanned events can disrupt operations. Resilient businesses make the investment in time, money and resources to plan how they will minimize and react to disruptions. That starts with an incident response plan. While incident response is a complex topic, three steps are most important in a cyber business interruption event:

1. Detect, Analyze and Respond

Most cyber incident response plans incorporate three major components:

1. Detection – Monitor systems, suppliers and the environment to detect events.
2. Analysis – Analyze events for their operational impact and escalate according to established criteria.
3. Response – Execute appropriate response activities to minimize operational impact and fully restore operations.

Ideally, an incident response plan will document how a business will detect events, its mechanism for analyzing them, especially when their information sources conflict, and plans for responding to various levels of events in an appropriate manner, logging those that require a response while quickly identifying others that threaten the business. Tabletop exercises can help businesses test, practice and refine these plans.

2. Cover Key Roles and Responsibilities

Cyber incident response plans often document key roles within the organization and outline their responsibilities in the event of a crisis. Typical plans cover roles including:

• Executive leadership – Provides top-level support for incident response, contributes to and approves escalation and notification criteria and handles executive-level decisions.
• Corporate counsel – Is responsible for ensuring any incident response is legal and regulatory compliant, minimizing legal risk and protecting company interests.
• Corporate communications – Ensures transparent and consistent communication, keeps internal and external stakeholders informed and maintains company reputation.
• Finance – Focuses on the incident’s financial risk and impact, maintains compliance and handles regulatory reporting, monitors cash flow and allocates budget for response, and manages vendors, contracts and insurance claims.
• Risk management – Ensures response activities align with planning, coordinates across organizational functions and initiates contingency and business continuity plans.
• Operations – Oversees operational continuity and event escalation, coordinates transitions between full and reduced operations and ensures employee safety and awareness.
• Information technology – Identifies and mitigates technology-related risks and contributes to “root cause” analysis, ensures continuous monitoring and situational awareness and oversees vulnerability patching, system recovery and technology backups.
• Cybersecurity – Detects and monitors threats, contributes to “root cause” analysis, ranks and prioritizes incidents by severity, contains and neutralizes identified threats and conducts employee awareness training.
• Facilities – Ensures compliance with health and safety regulations for employees, secures and monitors physical premises, manages backup facility services and prepares alternate work sites.

In small organizations, leaders may take on multiple roles and responsibilities or outsource them to specialists. In fact, most plans prepare for third-party incident response assistance from outside:

• Breach counsel
• Forensic accountants
• Digital forensics experts
• Public relations
• Restoration and remediation consultants
• Cyber extortion experts
• Notification and credit monitoring services
• Insurance brokers and carriers
• Law enforcement

However roles are organized for your business, careful coordination is always essential, helping you bounce back quickly from a cyber disruption.

3. Plan for Business Continuity

Business continuity plans focus on how an organization will maintain critical operations, potentially at a reduced capacity, during a disruptive cyber event. Plans for business continuity should compliment the plans your business develops for incident response. Business continuity plans need to answer these three questions:

1. What are our critical operations, key dependencies and obligations? Business continuity plans are aimed at maintaining critical operations in the face of a significant event. Organizations can start by analyzing their business to identify these and other critical aspects.
2. How should we prioritize to ensure business survival and success? Business impact analyses, financial quantification workshops and risk assessments for each line of business can be used to help prioritize what’s most important in an emergency.
3. What are our strategies to mitigate risk and continue operations? Businesses need written plans for continuing operations during a disruption. Scouting out alternate resource vendors, work sites and technology replacements are all common strategies, along with insurance.

How Can Cyber Business Interruption Insurance Help?

Cyber Insurance is designed to cover financial losses resulting from cyber events, such as data breaches, cybercrime, social engineering, ransomware attacks and more. Policies typically include a collection of coverages, including cyber business interruption coverage.

CyberLock Defense offers tailored coverage options that include cyber business interruption, protecting your business from losses sustained due to system failures, malicious attacks and third-party outages. Plus, the industry-leading coverage at CyberLock Defense is backed by best-in-class service from knowledgeable professionals who act as advocates for our clients.

Discover more benefits for your business today. Visit CyberLockDefense.com or call us at (844) 868-7144 to get started.