As a business leader, your commitment to cyber readiness sets the tone for your entire organization. Implementing our seven cybersecurity best practices will make your organization so much more secure from threats. In addition, create a culture of cybersecurity to enforce stronger policies and set your team up for success.
- Start by empowering your IT and security leaders. Define IT leadership roles within your organization early. Include them in high-level decisions that affect risk and operations, and make it clear across your organization that cybersecurity is a company priority. Security leaders should have the authority and support to act quickly during an attack.
- Share your cybersecurity policies and procedures with your employees. Make training a regular part of staff onboarding and ongoing development. Plan engaging cybersecurity training activities. Evaluate the effectiveness of security trainings through decrease or increase of security incidents and reporting during phishing simulations. Explore our no-cost resources, including a printable cybersecurity BINGO card for organizations that encourages learning while building a shared sense of responsibility.
- Create an Incident Response Plan. Involve your leadership team in regular tests of the response plan and walk through how your company would respond if systems went down, data was stolen or your networks were compromised. Practicing now means less confusion and downtime later.
- Make cyber incident reporting part of your company culture. Set a low threshold for reporting suspicious activity. Even blocked attacks or strange system behavior should be flagged and, when appropriate, reported to government agencies like CISA.
- Focus on continuity. Identify your most critical systems and make sure they can stay up and running during a cyber incident. Have backups ready and test them regularly. If your business depends on industrial systems or specialized tech, ensure your team knows how to operate them manually if needed. Consider using CISA’s no-cost SCuBA tool to harden software-as-a-service (SaaS) configurations to support best practices on cloud platforms. CISA also offers the Malcom tool at no-cost, which is an open-source tool for industrial control systems (ICS) that provides network analysis.
Cyber threats are a reality, but business disruption doesn’t have to be. Build a culture of awareness, action and accountability.
