Cyber Recovery 101: From Chaos to Control

1.

What are the 3 most important skills that a business needs to call on when hit by ransomware?

Rapid Incident Response & Forensics

Quickly determine the incident’s scope, enact containment to stop further spread, and identify the entry point used by the threat actor.

Combined Cybersecurity and IT Ops Expertise

Understanding the landscape fully is critical. Combining this with confidence, a clear recovery plan, and a security-first mindset to bring priority systems back online safely. This is often before the full forensic picture is complete so that the business can resume operations without introducing new risk.

Communication & Crisis Management

Clear, decisive and consistent communication minimises confusion, accelerates decisions, preserves trust, and keeps everyone aligned with the recovery plan. Communicating both internally and externally, including with employees, customers, regulators and possibly law enforcement is key.

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2.

What is the most common entry method of attack?

Are your people leaving the front door open?

We see a wide range of attack methods, from highly targeted campaigns to brute-force attempts. However, the most common way attackers gain access is through weak or compromised credentials.

Most breaches start with people, not tech. Social engineering; phishing emails, fake MFA prompts, and bogus ‘IT support’ calls all coax staff into inadvertently handing over access. Poor password habits do the rest: reuse across services, predictable patterns, shared logins, and credentials parked in notes or browsers.

Once inside, they can quickly escalate their privileges and move deeper into your network(often known as Lateral Movement).

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3.

What is one “small” change a business can make to drastically improve their Cyber Resilience?

Enable MFA

One small but high-impact change most companies can make today is enabling multi-factor authentication (MFA) for all accounts. Especially for admins and anyone with remote access.

It’s quick to implement in most environments, often at low or no cost, and drastically reduces the risk of account compromise from phishing or stolen passwords. Even just starting with “MFA by default” for admin accounts and gradually expanding to all users can block most opportunistic attacks.

It’s like adding a deadbolt to your digital front door, it's only a small action, but it stops most casual break-ins in their tracks.

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4.

Why is Cyber Recovery so time sensitive and intense?

Minutes Matter: Contain, Preserve, Restore

Cyber recovery is highly time sensitive because the speed of response directly impacts both the scope of damage and the chances of a successful recovery. After a ransomware attack, it’s common for the attacker to still have access to the environment, so rapid containment is critical to prevent further spread. At the same time, it’s a race against the clock to preserve log data before it’s overwritten or lost, ensuring the forensics team has what they need. In many cases, the business is left in a complete outage, so the priority becomes restoring at least primary systems or key communication tools as quickly and securely as possible to get operations moving again.