Not optional, but also not easy. Even a well-prepared CSO knows that an incident response plan can't keep his company completely safe from attack - even with the latest tools for intrusion detection. "There's just no such thing as zero risk," says Leslie Macartney, CISO for Reuters. "And you can't always predict the number, nature or severity of the attacks. But incident response plans are necessary because, in short, no matter how much you try, things will occasionally go wrong. Your company is at its greatest exposure in the time between when an incident occurs and when the containment actions are completed - that's when most of the damage occurs."

And it's not just an internal matter, says Macartney. "Customer confidence can be damaged if it appears the company has been remiss in its handling of security events. The company's reputation could be at stake."

But you can't protect everything completely, so you must prioritize, Macartney adds. By creating a specific strategy that states what to prioritize and how to react if an incident does happen - and by making your security organization capable of detecting, analyzing, and responding quickly and knowledgeably to an event - you can limit the damage done and lower the costs of recovery. And then, by knowing who to call and what to do next, you can decrease the amount of time it takes to recover and possibly save you and your staff from additional disasters along the way.

"The organizations that don't know how to respond to incidents are the ones that will really get hurt," says Kevin Connell, director of information security for the shared data center of the Securities Industry Automation Corp., which runs the computer systems and communications networks of the New York and American stock exchanges. "And while it's hard to protect against something you can't predict, it's not so hard to react decisively in crisis situations once you have a plan in place and a procedure to follow."

Getting Started

When thinking about incident response planning, remember that the best defense is a good offense. But before you do anything, says Ariel Silverstone, CISO at Temple University, it's important to define the nature of a cyber attack. That way, you can decide what constitutes an incident for your company. Generally speaking, a computer incident is anything that potentially compromises the confidentiality, integrity or availability of a computer system. Sometimes such incidents can be real - like a service outage. Other times, the incident is merely a perceived attack - like when a file disappears because an employee simply moved it from one server to another without telling anyone.