January 2, 2025

As cybercrime attacks continuously morph and intensify, organizations of all sizes need to ensure that their IT services, sensitive data, and other digital assets are adequately protected in relation to identified risks. Because data breaches and other cybersecurity incidents are inherently unpredictable in their timing and consequences, every organization must have a plan to mitigate financial, operational, and reputational risks and impacts when an event inevitably occurs. This is your cybersecurity contingency plan.  

 This post explains cybersecurity contingency planning, why it is so important, how it fits with other cybersecurity and IT plans, and how it can benefit your organization in a crisis and beyond.  

What is a cybersecurity contingency plan? 

A cybersecurity contingency plan is a series of coordinated actions and technical processes a business initiates in case of a cyberattack. It enables security staff and others to efficiently negotiate a cyber incident by applying incident response, risk management, data restoration, and threat assessment techniques. A robust cybersecurity contingency plan can enhance organizational resilience by significantly reducing the scope and impacts of a cyberattack while protecting business-critical digital assets. 

Essential steps to support cybersecurity contingency planning includes: 

  • Classifying all your critical information assets and where they reside. 
  • Assessing the cybersecurity risks to those critical assets and their potential impacts if they were to manifest. 
  • Identifying and putting into place the compensating controls required to treat (avoid, reduce, transfer, or accept) those risks.    

To help US government agencies and other organizations develop contingency plans for their IT systems, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) maintains NIST 800-34, Contingency Planning Guide for Information Technology Systems. NIST 800-34 frames contingency planning based on the “security impact level” of the associated IT systems. 

What are the benefits of cybersecurity contingency planning? 

The point of contingency planning in general is to minimize negative operational, financial, and reputational impacts when ransomware attacks, natural disasters, and other unplanned events occur. These impacts include business downtime, regulatory sanctions, customer dissatisfaction and loss, abrogated supplier/partner relationships, and recovery costs. 

By guiding staff on how to address the factors contributing to these impacts, a cybersecurity contingency plan helps organizations avoid confusion and missteps to maintain resilience and agility even in the face of disruption. Firms with cybersecurity contingency plans can weather cyber incidents better than those that do not. 

Top benefits of cybersecurity contingency planning for businesses of all sizes include: 

  • Accelerating recovery time. This includes quickly containing attack vectors, recovering impacted systems, maintaining network and service availability, patching high-risk vulnerabilities, and restoring business as usual. 
  • Minimizing damaging impacts from the event. This includes minimizing or preventing data compromise, recovery costs, IT downtime, customer problems, legal/compliance issues, and loss of stakeholder trust.  
  • Maintaining business continuity. This includes orchestrating recovery procedures, resource allocation, and internal/external communications to reduce or eliminate the many damages associated with IT disruptions.  

For example, if ransomware or other malware compromises business-critical services, a cybersecurity contingency plan would enable team members to engage failover/high availability functions, transition users and workloads to alternate systems, and maintain service availability to minimize operational and productivity impacts while the malware is eradicated.  

What should a cybersecurity contingency plan cover? 

Growing organizations need a contingency plan for cyberattacks. Some of the foundational steps in many cybersecurity plans include: 

  • Prioritizing backup and recovery of sensitive data to reduce the risk of data loss and ransomware threats. 
  • Analyzing cybersecurity risks and their potential business impacts so you can develop strategies for mitigating them. 
  • Building a contingency planning team (possibly including third-party members) to ensure the plan realizes the objectives of different departments and levels of management.  
  • Keeping software updated to eliminate known vulnerabilities. 
  • Training staff on cybersecurity awareness and best practices to protect data assets and spot phishing and other social engineering attacks. 
  • Delegating a “chain of command” and efficient communications protocols so staff know who to report to when an incident occurs.  
  • Defining procedures for when, what, and how to notify and communicate with stakeholders. 
  • Exercising and testing your plan at least annually to identify opportunities for improvement and keep up with changes. 

How does a cybersecurity contingency plan relate to business continuity, incident response, and disaster recovery plans? 

A cybersecurity contingency plan encompasses and coordinates other IT and cybersecurity related plans by preparing the business as a whole for cyber disruptions. These ancillary plans include: 

  • The incident response plan, which guides the response to specific kinds of cyber incidents. 
  • The IT disaster recovery plan, which directs the ordered restoration of IT systems impacted by a cyberattack or other disaster to support operational continuity.  
  • The data backup/restoration plan, which directs the recovery of sensitive data. 

Different plans are also invoked over different timeframes. Incident response and disaster recovery plans, for example, have shorter durations than the overall cybersecurity contingency plan, which may be active for weeks following a cyber incident.  

Similarly, different plans are meant to be invoked at different points in the incident cycle: 

  • Contingency planning positions the organization for success in advance of the incident and operates both before and throughout the incident timeline.  
  • Disaster recovery, IT recovery, data restoration, and similar plans focus on restoring normal operations after the incident has occurred.  

Finally, a cybersecurity contingency plan engages with many different stakeholders (clients, legal team, forensics team, board, partners, etc.). Subsidiary plans like an incident response plan or data backup plan may involve mostly IT, security, and privacy/compliance teams.  

What’s next? 

Too many businesses don’t think they need a cybersecurity contingency plan until they experience a ransomware attack or other cyber incident. Don’t wait until it’s too late to start thinking about risk management.  

CBIZ Pivot Point Security provides consulting services to help our clients develop cybersecurity contingency plans and other strategies to manage business disruptions, enhance organizational resilience, and give stakeholders peace of mind.  

Contact us to discuss your planning goals with a cyber risk management expert.