In digital marketing, you are bound to handle vast volumes of data from campaign analytics and customer information. This data is valuable for exploitation by cybercriminals.
Since most companies are at risk of cyberattacks, there’s a need for all digital marketers to have a well-structured incident response plan. You see, as a digital marketing agency, proactive cybersecurity measures can save you from reputation damage and legal trouble.
To understand the importance of this, it helps to see how successful digital-first platforms prioritize these protections. For example, an overview of payment methods at Lottoland illustrates how digital-first platforms meet those expectations.
This write-up aims to help you understand what incident response is and the steps digital marketers should take after a data breach has occurred. The goal is to ensure you stay legally compliant, maintain brand credibility, safeguard your platforms, and protect customer information.
Read on!
What is Incident Response?
In simple terms, incident response refers to the process of handling a data breach or cyberattack. It’s a structured approach containing an organization’s processes and technologies for detecting and responding to cyberattacks.
The primary goal is to help you minimize damage, costs, and recovery time, as well as prevent future incidents.
For digital marketing agencies — or any other organization — an incident response plan should define what constitutes an incident and provide a guided process to be followed when an incident occurs. In that case, you’ll need a computer security incident response team (CSIRT) to help you create and execute that plan.
Intersection of Cybersecurity and Digital Marketing
In our introduction, we talked about how you are bound to handle huge volumes of data as a digital marketer. It’s because data is the lifeblood of the digital marketing industry.
Critical digital marketing data such as user behavior, demographics, and user preferences must be safeguarded properly to avoid legal liability and tarnishing your reputation.
The vast majority of digital marketing agencies rely on tools and platforms such as email marketing services, social media, and analytics tools. Most of these tools are third-parties, which increases the risks of cyberattacks.
These attacks include:
- Phishing attacks where cybercriminals use deceptive messages, especially through emails, to trick you into revealing sensitive information.
- Malware attacks where a software designed to disrupt or harm your system gains its way into your network.
- Ransomware attacks where you are locked out of essential tools until you pay a ransom.
- Data breaches where unauthorized personnel gain access to customer data.
- Malvertising, which is when the attacker injects a malicious code into a digital ad with the aim of infecting the user’s device once they click on it or view it.
Incident Response Steps and Procedures to Follow
1. Preparing for Threats
It should be noted that preparation is a continuous process. It involves a thorough risk assessment on a regular basis.
As stated earlier, you must have a clear incident response plan. Once that’s out of the way, identify potential threats and vulnerabilities, then train your team.
Ideally, your team should prioritize each type of incident based on its potential impact on your organization. Your incident response playbook should include the roles and responsibilities of each team member.
2. Detecting and Analyzing the Threat
This is the phase where your security team monitors your system and network for any suspicious activity using paid solutions such as log monitoring tools. The team analyzes data, alerts, and notifications gathered from device logs, as well as various security tools such as antivirus software and firewalls. The goal is to identify incidents in progress. From there, you’ll need to investigate the nature and scope of the incident.
3. Containing the Threat
This phase involves taking the necessary action to stop the incident from spreading or causing further damage. The team initiates an emergency incident response plan, which comes in two categories — short-term mitigation and long-term containment.
When performing a short-term mitigation, you’d focus on isolating the affected system to prevent further spread. For instance, you can take an infected device offline.
On the other hand, performing a long-term containment measure involves protecting the unaffected systems. It requires employing stringer security controls around your systems. An excellent example is when you segment sensitive databases from the rest of the network.
4. Eradicating the Threat
This is when you remove the cause of that particular incident. So, once you’ve succeeded in containing the threat, the next step is focusing on eradicating it. It may involve booting an unauthorized user from your network and/or removal of malware from your system.
At this stage, it’s important to ensure that no traces of the breach are left in your system. Your team should review both affected and unaffected systems to achieve this.
5. Recovery and Restoration
In this stage, you’d focus on restoring systems and data to their normal state. Of course, this is after your team has thoroughly assessed the network and is confident that the threat has been removed completely.
The recovery and restoration phase involves tasks such as bringing your system back to online, deploying patches, and rebuilding systems from backups.
Ensure you keep a record of the attack and its resolution. It’s very helpful during analysis and system improvement.
6. Post-incident Review
The goal here is to learn from the incident by analyzing it to identify lessons your team can learn so that you can improve response efforts in the future.
Typically, in every stage discussed above, your security team must document the steps it took to handle the threat — i.e., how did the attack succeed in breaching the network? What was the root cause? How can you make sure that such incidents don’t reoccur in the future?
You’d then use all the information collected to better understand that particular incident and gather “lessons learned.” This is also the stage where law enforcement might be involved.
Final Thought
Looking into the future, we can tell artificial intelligence (AI) will help organization employees have more robust defenses against cyber threats — the same way cybercriminals are relying more on AI to execute their attacks.
So, as a digital marketer looking to leverage data when creating compelling campaigns, ensure you protect that data from individuals with ill intent by having incident response in your organization.
