Conducting a Cybersecurity ‘Fire Drill’
When the fire alarm goes off you know exactly what to do:
- Leave behind anything that isn’t absolutely necessary to your personal health and safety.
- Help people who may require assistance to exit the building.
- Go outside and wait in a designated location for further instruction.
- Wait for someone to do a roll call and check to make sure everyone has safely existed the building.
In the event of a real fire a number of other expected things will also take place:
- 911 will be called or the fire alarm will send an automatic signal to the fire department.
- Sprinklers and other fire suppression systems will go off, and fire doors will close.
- Emergency services show up to deal with the fire.
Fire drills are important because they allow you to practice what you need to do in an emergency. They are also an opportunity to reflect on what happened and how to do better in the future. Of course, in the event of a real fire, it could take some time to clean up and resume operations. Most organizations have documents that describe policies (what and why) and procedures (how) related to fire drills and business recovery. We’ll talk in the next unit about 💼Business Continuity plans.
A cyber ‘fire drill’ has a similar role – it is a practice exercise that you conduct periodically, to remind you:
- How to act in an emergency.
- To identify preparations that could reduce the impacts of a cyber disruption.
- Helps you feel confident that you’ll know what to do in the event of a cyber incident.
- Minimizes damage (including livestock, crop, information or financial losses) and gets your business up and running again, as quickly as possible.
Conducting a cyber fire drill doesn’t have to be complicated – it just needs to be planned, documented, implemented on a regular schedule, and updated every time you learn something new about what will help you be more cyber safe, or add more layers of protection to your operation.
Here are the main elements of a cyber fire drill:
To go into more detail on how to plan a cyber ‘fire drill’, check out this worksheet:
PDF document 2MB
Keep in mind that fire drills are only good if they are conducted regularly. Having a plan and conducting cyber drills will help you be much more ready, in the event of a cyber incident affecting your farm business.
Next: 👮Cybersecurity Supports
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License .