Cybersecurity Crisis Prep: A Guide for Businesses
▼ Summary
– Organizations are highly likely to face a cyber-attack, but the incident does not have to harm business reputation or staff wellbeing.
– Cybersecurity and business leaders should clearly communicate the incident and recovery actions to internal and external stakeholders.
– A concise crisis strategy playbook, focused on the crisis type, key participants, and clear responsibilities, is essential for an effective response.
– Nicola Hudson emphasized that a good playbook is short and covers three components: crisis type, who is in the room, and trusted responsibilities.
– Ashish Shrestha noted that playbooks fail because reality is unpredictable, requiring leaders to correlate fragmented data under pressure.
In today’s digital landscape, the likelihood of a business experiencing a cyber-attack is alarmingly high. But falling victim to an incident doesn’t have to mean the end of your company’s reputation or the emotional toll on your team. With the right approach, both can be preserved.
Cybersecurity and business leaders can take concrete steps to communicate effectively during a crisis, clearly explaining what happened and outlining the actions underway to restore normal operations. This applies to both internal teams and external stakeholders. The key, according to senior cybersecurity leaders who have navigated major incidents, is having a strategic crisis playbook ready before trouble strikes.
This guidance came to light during a keynote session at Infosecurity Europe 2026 on June 3, titled “Crisis Communications – Contingency Plans to Put in Place Now.”
Building a Cybersecurity Crisis Playbook: Focus on What, Who, and How
Nicola Hudson, partner and global cyber practice co-lead at Brunswick and former director of policy and communication at the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), emphasized that an effective playbook doesn’t need to be a hundred pages. Instead, it should be concise and centered on three core components.
“One: What type of crisis are you dealing with? Two: Who are you going to have in the room?” she explained. “Three: Understand responsibilities and trust each other. Everyone needs to know what they are doing, no second guessing or getting angst ridden when you are tired and four days in.”
These three pillars set the foundation for the entire crisis response. Handling a cybersecurity incident is inherently difficult, but the pressure multiplies when decisions must be made with only fragments of incomplete information.
Ashish Shrestha, CEO of Zyn Global and former group CISO of Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), offered a sobering reality check. “Playbooks don’t fail because of technology, they fail because reality doesn’t follow a script,” he said.
“In the war room, you have immense pressure building. The information coming to you is not just changing in minutes, sometimes it’s contextless and in fragments. That is the leadership moment: how do you take those fragments of data and start correlating the next steps,” he added.
(Source: Infosecurity Magazine)
