It is just before 3 o’clock in the morning and the phone rings. Not your mobile, you’ve left that downstairs so that work doesn’t impinge too much into your home life. It’s the landline. This must be trouble.
As your brain flights to engage, your thoughts turn to your children but the voice on the other end is one of your operations team. She tells you that the police have been on to say that the office block where your business is located is on fire and that there is no way that anyone will be able to get in there tomorrow. Her name was at the top of the call out list.
You ask her a few more questions but she has little information to offer, everything is very sketchy, so you thank her and put down the phone.
Fortunately your business continuity plans are ready to kick in. Those months of planning will pay off. You go downstairs and put the kettle on, pick up your mobile and kick off the plan by calling the senior management team to a conference call. Each will be assigned a task, such as contacting the rest of the team to let them know what is happening, opening up the resilient site and restoring the technology from backup where necessary. You’ll take responsibility for comms and the media and you agree where and when the team will next meet.
The following few months are going to be difficult but you and the business will survive. Your family is safe and your worst fears have not come true.
It is just before 3 o’clock in the morning and the phone rings. Not your mobile, it is the landline. This must be trouble. The voice is one of your technical team. She tells you that she has been getting infrastructure warning messages all night and that it looks like the systems have been compromised. Everything points to a cyber attack and she has done everything she can to protect the systems. Nothing is working and there is no way that the business will be operational before the team get in to work tomorrow.
You ask her a few more questions but she has little more to offer, everything is still sketchy, so you thank her and put down the phone.
A cold shiver runs down your spine. Have you planned for such an event?
Have you?
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 