Cyber Incident Response Plan (CIRP) Creation

When Something Goes Wrong, You Don't Want to Figure Out Your Plan On The Fly

Most small businesses don't think about what happens after a breach. They think about preventing one. That's understandable, but it's only half the picture.

No security setup is perfect. Attackers get smarter, software has vulnerabilities, and people make mistakes. The businesses that recover quickly from a cyber incident aren't the ones who were perfectly protected, they're the ones who knew what to do when something happened. They had a plan, they followed it, and they didn't waste critical hours making decisions they should have made in advance.

A Cyber Incident Response Plan is that plan. If something goes sideways, it tells everyone exactly what happens next.

What We Build For You

• A Clear Chain of Decisions. Who decides the business needs to go into incident mode? Who gets called first? Who has the authority to shut systems down? Who talks to customers? Who talks to the press if it gets that far? Every one of these decisions made in advance is one you don't have to make under pressure at the worst possible moment.
• A Contact List. Your cyber insurance carrier's claims line. Your IT contacts. Your attorney. Your bank's fraud department. The relevant regulatory bodies if you're in an industry that requires breach notification. We build a single reference document with every number and email address you'd need organized by when you'd need it.
• Step-by-Step Response Procedures. What do you do in the first hour? The first day? The first week? We map out the specific actions your team takes at each stage. We decide what to isolate, what not to touch, how to preserve evidence, how to assess the scope of what happened. Clear enough that someone who's never dealt with a breach before can follow it without calling us first.
• Customer and Vendor Notification Templates. If customer data is involved, you have legal obligations around notification. Things like timing, content, and specific languages required need to be made ahead of time. We draft notification templates in advance so that if the moment comes, you're not writing something from scratch while your attorney is on hold.
• Legal and Regulatory Guidance. Depending on your industry and the nature of the incident, you may have reporting obligations to regulators, credit card networks, or law enforcement. We document what applies to your business specifically rather than a generic list of every possible requirement. This way you know what you're on the hook for before you're in the middle of it.
• A Tested Plan, Not Just a Written One. A plan nobody has read is almost as useful as no plan. After we deliver it, we walk your team through tabletop exercises. We create hypothetical scenarios where we talk through what would actually happen step by step. It doesn't take long, and it surfaces gaps in the plan while the stakes are zero.

What Triggers This Conversation

If any of this sounds familiar, it's probably time to draft a CIRP. 

Your cyber insurance application asked whether you have an incident response plan and you had to answer no. A client contract requires documentation of your response procedures. Maybe you had a close call like a phishing email that almost worked or a ransomware attempt that got blocked, and you realized you had no idea what you would have done if the attempt had worked. Or you simply want to know that if something happened tomorrow, your business wouldn't be paralyzed while everyone figured out what to do.

Hope You Never Need It. Be Glad You Have It.