The Day You Get Attacked: A Blueprint for Surviving Cyber Chaos
Let’s get real: it’s not if your business gets hit with a cyber attack—it’s when. And when that day comes, it won’t arrive like a polite calendar reminder. It’ll slam into your systems like a ransomware freight train, hijack your workflows, and reduce your best-laid plans to digital ashes.
This is your no-BS guide to cyber attack preparedness, designed specifically for small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs). It’s also the foundational playbook we’re using in our upcoming webinar with our partners at ArmorPoint—because incident response theory is nice, but execution saves companies.
BEFORE: Build Your “Oh $#*!” Protocol
1. Know your crown jewels (and how to lock them up)
Identify Your Critical Business Assets: If everything is a priority, nothing is. Start by mapping your business-critical data, software, and infrastructure. These are your “crown jewels.” Protect them with layers of security—think multi-factor authentication, network segmentation, and strict least-privilege access.
2. Practice the breach
Simulate a Real-World Attack: Tabletop exercises are not optional—they’re your business fire drill. Build scenarios based on real ransomware or phishing threats. Walk through the attack timeline. Who responds? Who communicates? Who isolates the threat? If your only answer is “IT will handle it,” you’re already losing.
3. Decide now who makes the call
Pre-Assign Roles and Approvals: When every second counts, decision paralysis is lethal. Assign roles. Empower leaders. And make it clear who can shut down systems, engage legal, and call in cyber insurance or forensics teams. Write it down. Everyone signs it.
DURING: Control the Bleed
1. Contain, don’t just panic
Contain the Threat Immediately: If your SIEM lights up at 2AM, containment is the first priority. Isolate systems. Pull machines. Kill access. Every minute you delay, the attackers are pivoting, exfiltrating, encrypting—or worse, live-streaming your QuickBooks. A strong managed IT services team will already have automation and monitoring in place—don’t try to wing this in the heat of battle.
2. Communicate like a boss
Maintain Business Continuity: You’re not just managing systems, you’re managing people. Employees, partners, even clients. Be clear, calm, and candid. Fear spreads faster than malware. Get ahead of the rumor mill with prepared, approved messaging. A solid business continuity plan ensures that critical functions (like payroll, customer support, and communications) stay online even when your infrastructure is under siege.
3. Record everything
Document Every Action: Start a forensic log the moment you detect the breach. Who touched what, when? What got unplugged? What alerts fired? These breadcrumbs become your Rosetta Stone for recovery and compliance. This record is critical for insurance, compliance, and post-breach remediation.
AFTER: Rebuild Stronger, Smarter
1. Postmortem the hell out of it
Conduct a Full Cybersecurity Postmortem: Too many companies treat recovery like a finish line. It's not. It’s an inflection point. Conduct a brutally honest after-action review. What worked? What failed? What were your blind spots? Then fix them—fast.
2. Re-architect with resilience in mind
Upgrade Security Infrastructure: This is your opportunity to implement smarter segmentation, hardened endpoints, zero trust policies, better alerting, and real response automation. Don’t just patch—transform. Invest in Microsoft 365 security enhancements, endpoint detection, zero trust architecture, and 24/7 monitoring. Think of it as replacing wooden doors with blast-proof steel.
3. Re-educate your team
Re-Train Your Employees: If users were part of the breach (and they almost always are), train them—not just in what to click, but how to report suspicious behavior quickly. Fear-based training is out. Engagement-based training is in. Roll out engaging, role-specific cybersecurity awareness training. Repetition builds reflex—and reflex is what saves you when the real attack hits.
The Secret Weapon: Cyber Resilience Culture
Most companies think cybersecurity is an IT issue. It’s not. It’s a business risk issue. Which means your marketing team, your CEO, your front desk receptionist—they all play a role.
This is the part most businesses miss: Cyber resilience is everyone's job
Culture is what people do when no one’s watching. And the day you get attacked, a resilient culture will do more to save your company than any tech stack ever could.
Try It Yourself / Ask for Help / Hire the Experts
Try It Yourself: Run a tabletop drill this month. Pick your top 3 "most likely" attack vectors and simulate a real breach scenario.
Ask for Help: Need a heat map of your risk exposure? We’ve got diagnostics that’ll show you where you're vulnerable (and what to do next).
Hire the Experts: If you're reading this and thinking “we'd be toast,” let’s talk. Because rebuilding is painful. But regret is a lot more expensive.
Stay tuned for the webinar—we’ll unpack this playbook live, with real examples, and some epic “you won’t believe this happened” stories.
Until then: secure smart, move fast, and don’t wait for the breach to figure out who’s in charge.
– Sam Sailors
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