As we head into Thanksgiving—menus planned, guests invited, travel set—one thing often missing from the checklist is a plan for when things go sideways online. A cyber incident response plan is the playbook your team follows after a breach, ransomware event, or other attack. Regulated industries (like healthcare and finance) are required to have one, but even smaller organizations need a clear, practical plan—because cybercriminals don’t take holidays.
Think of it like Thanksgiving dinner prep: you don’t start planning after the smoke alarm goes off. You write the recipe, assign roles, and prep ingredients so you can respond calmly if the oven misbehaves.
Why Every Company Needs a Plan (Especially During the Holidays)
- Faster containment: Minutes matter. A documented plan shortens the time from “Uh-oh” to “Under control.”
- Lower impact: Clear steps help you isolate systems, protect customers, and get back to business quicker.
- Regulatory readiness: If notification rules apply, you’ll know who to tell, when, and how.
- Holiday resilience: With folks traveling and teams short-staffed, a written plan keeps everyone aligned when key people are away.
What to Include in Your Incident Response “Recipe”
1) Roles & Contact Tree
- Who declares an incident?
- Who leads technical triage, communications, legal, and exec decisions?
- After-hours/holiday contacts (with phone, SMS, and backup numbers).
2) Detection & Containment Steps
- How to collect indicators (alerts, user reports, EDR telemetry).
- Immediate actions: isolate endpoints, disable risky accounts, block malicious IPs/domains, revoke tokens.
- Criteria for escalating from “suspected” to “confirmed” incident.
3) Ransomware & Breach Playbooks
- Ransomware: network isolation, preserve evidence, switch to known-good communications, invoke backup/failover.
- Data breach: identify data types affected, time window, systems touched; start a legal/compliance review.
4) Lost or Stolen Devices
- Remote lock/wipe, password rotations, token revocation, and report procedures—especially for laptops and mobiles used while traveling.
5) Legal, Insurance & Notifications
- Cyber insurance policy details (claim contacts, required timelines, approved vendors).
- Outside counsel on deck for privacy and breach notification laws.
- Pre-approved messaging for employees, clients, vendors—and media if needed.
6) Recovery & “Failback” from Backups
- Where backups live (including immutable/offline), restore priority order, and RTO/RPO targets.
- Validation steps before bringing systems back (malware-free certification, account hardening).
7) Communications Plan
- One source of truth (war-room channel), status cadence, stakeholder-specific updates.
- Alternate comms if email/SSO is impacted (phones, secure chat, out-of-band channels).
8) Tabletop Drills & Holiday Readiness
- Run a 60–90 minute tabletop: simulate a Thanksgiving-week ransomware hit.
- Capture gaps, update the plan, and re-test quarterly.
First 24 Hours: A Quick Carve-Out
- Confirm & contain: isolate systems, revoke access, preserve logs/evidence.
- Assemble the team: IR lead, IT, security, exec, legal, comms, insurance.
- Triage impact: what data/systems, who’s affected, business interruption.
- Decide on restoration path: failover/restore from clean backups.
- Notify as required: customers, partners, regulators—using prepared templates.
- Harden before failback: patch, rotate creds, increase monitoring, validate clean state.
Holiday Security Extras (Because Pie Isn’t the Only Thing That Gets Burned)
- Freeze high-risk changes the week of major holidays.
- Enable heightened alerting for admin logins, impossible travel, new MFA enrollments, and bulk data movement.
- Ensure on-call coverage and vendor hotlines are current (EDR, MSSP, forensics, cloud providers).
Bottom line: A written, tested incident response plan turns chaos into coordinated action—so you can keep cyber threats off the Thanksgiving table and get back to what matters.
Need help building or testing your plan before the holiday rush? Contact F8 Consulting for a free consultation.