Leadership During An Incident

At some point in your CSO career you are going to have to deal with and lead through an incident. Here are some things I have found helpful.

Know Your Role

Unless you work at a very small company, I argue your role is not to be hands on keyboard during an incident. You shouldn’t be looking up hashes, checking logs, etc. Your role is to coordinate resources, focus efforts and cognitively offload your team from key decisions. You need to lead people during this chaotic event.

Declaring An Actual Incident

This may vary depending on company size and type, but in general the CSO should not be the one to declare a security incident. The CSO (and their representatives) can certainly advise and recommend, but declaring an incident carries legal, regulatory and business ramifications that should be made by a combination of the Chief Legal Counsel and some representation of C-Suite members (CEO, CTO, etc.). Once an incident is declared, your company will most likely need to disclose it on SEC forms and customers may need to be notified. All of this could impact your company’s reputation, stock price and customer goodwill.

Use A War Room

A war room is simply a place where everyone can gather for updates, questions, etc. It is a place that is dedicated to this function. If you are physically in the office, it is a dedicated conference room that has privacy from onlookers. If you have a virtual team it is a Zoom, Teams, WebEx, etc. that gets created and shared with people that need to know.

The CSO’s role in the war room is to keep the war room active and focused. Once the war room is created and the right people join, everyone should discuss what happened, what is impacted and what the course of action should be. Document this somewhere and pin it to the appropriate channels. If people join and start asking basic questions, send them away to read the existing documentation first. If people want to have a detailed technical discussion then send them to a breakout room. The point is to keep the main room clear for making decisions and directing resources.

Bridge The Gap

Your role during an incident is two fold – 1) Communicate to other leaders within the company about what happened so you can get the appropriate support to resolve the incident and 2) Direct the appropriate resources to focus on resolving the incident quickly, while following appropriate chain of evidence, legal requirements, customer notifications, etc.

Keep it short and sweet so they can respond as needed. The purpose of this email is to inform them so they can give you the support you and your team need. Make sure to invoke legal privilege and keep the audience small (I discuss this in my post about Legal Privilege).

I use the following email template when communicating about an incident.

Subject: PRIVILEGED – Security Incident In [Product/Service X]

A security incident was detected at [Date / Time] in [product x] resulting in [data breach/ransomware/etc.] At this time the cause of the incident is suspected to be [x]. Customer impact is [low/medium/high/critical].

The security team and impacted product team are actively working to resolve the incident by [doing x]. This resolution is expected [at date / time x].

For any questions please reach out to me directly or join the war room [here].

Next update to this audience in [x time period].

Your job here is to get the team any resources they need, offload them from decisions and then get out of their way. It is also important that you buffer them from any distractions and protect them from burnout by enforcing handoffs and reminding people to take breaks. It is easy for your team to get caught up in the excitement and sacrifice their personal well being. Learn to recognize the signs of fatigue and have resource contingency plans in place so you can shift resources as needed to keep the overall investigation and response on track.

Designate someone to help coordinate logistics like meeting times, capturing notes, etc. Capture action items, who owns the action item and when the next update or expected completion time will be.

Have A Backup Plan An Practice Using Them

Hope for the best and prepare for the worst. Can your incident response team still function if your messaging service is down? What if your paging program doesn’t work or you can’t stand up a virtual war room? Part of your incident response playbooks should include fallback plans for out of band communications in the event of a total disruption of productivity services at your company. Practice using these during table top exercises so everyone knows the protocols for when to fall back on them if needed.

Wrapping Up

Incidents are both exciting and stressful. It is up to the CSO to lead from the front and provide guidance to their team, executive leadership and the rest of the organization. CSO’s need to buffer their teams to allow them to focus on the task at hand, while protecting them from burnout. CSO’s also need to remember the conduct and response of the organization could be recalled in court some day so following appropriate evidence collection, notification guidelines and legal best practices are a must.