CYBERSECURITY

Be cyber secure: creating a cyber response plan
Businesses continue to be a focus for cyber criminals and those businesses that haven’t put a proper
cybersecurity strategy in place are most at risk. Through good planning and smart response processes, you canmitigate vulnerabilities and limit threats to your network.

Develop strong internal tools and processes
Create an incident response teamAssign participants clear roles and responsibilities
by answering these questions: Who has the authority
to make decisions? Who will track the event andcommunicate beginning to end?

Establish an information-gathering procedure tounderstand how incident details will be compiled,summarized and shared with your executives,
teams and partners.

Create a communications plan and workflow. Determine
how team members will communicate, which channels
are preferred and who will report to internal and external
stakeholders when concerns arise.

Gather contact information for all vendors andthird-party suppliers.

Design playbooks to address cyber events
Build a step-by-step cyber response playbook that
explains what to do when confronted with different typesof cybersecurity events.
Conduct security testing of your apps, devices and IT
infrastructure on a regular basis to identify vulnerabilities
before they can be exploited.

Schedule time for teams to run tabletop exercises tovalidate playbook effectiveness.
Adopt a threat management model for addressing
cyber events, should they arise.

Know where to turn to for help
Determine the person or team responsible forcybersecurity within each of your company’sfunctional areas and include their names on a list ofinternal and external points of contact for distribution
to your staff.
Include internal off-hours contact numbers,
noting that many system breaches and network
compromises are attempted after normal working
hours, on weekends or on holidays.

Establish relationships with your legal, banking
and cyber forensics teams before a cyber event
occurs and understand who can quarantine or shut
down systems, websites or services on short notice.
Identify the individuals and specialists you candraw on if you need immediate expertise, beyond
the scope of your team, to assist your staff whenunexpected cyber events arise.

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Establish a communication strategy
Understand how you will share cyber incident
information with each type of stakeholder: external
partners, investors and the general public.
Use time-saving templates that standardize threat
reports and updates, and highlight key incident details.

Protect your privacy and guard against leaks bycreating secure communications channels.
Define threat severity levels and the circumstancesin which you should further escalate concerns toadditional stakeholders.

Identify sources of concern
Thoroughly investigate the root cause of any cyberincidents and share the results with your recovery
teams.

Assess organizational performance during theseincidents and decide where to give threat responders
more autonomy to help boost response times.

Review past incidents periodically to verify that alllessons from the event have been incorporated into
established risk mitigation plans.

Review your incident response plans quarterly,
revisiting your strategies to find areas forimprovement.

To learn more
The Global Information Security (GIS) team at Bank of America is made up of information security professionalsstaffing multiple security operations centers across the globe who work 24/7 to keep data and information safe.
Visit www.business.bofa.com/managingfraudrisk to learn how to help protect yourself and those closest to you.

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is provided “as is,“ with no guarantee of completeness, accuracy, timeliness or of the results obtained from the use of this material, andwithout warranty of any kind, express or implied, including, but not limited to warranties of performance, quality and fitness for a particularpurpose. This material should be regarded as general information on information security and IT considerations and is not intended toprovide specific information security or IT advice nor is it any substitute for your own independent investigations. If you have questions
regarding your particular IT system or information security concerns, please contact your IT or information security advisor.
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