The email nobody wants!
Yesterday I had that email we all dread – “Hi Amy, I’ve had an email from one of your team and we think it’s a scam, just wanted to let you know.”
Then I had several others, and as many phone messages from lovely contacts wanting me to know. I’m grateful for my community of clients and contacts for letting me know straight away so I could sort it.
We took the following steps within an hour.
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Stopped what we were doing and got onto our IT guy who specialises in cyberattacks to crawl over our systems to check what’s happened, and we followed his instructions.
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Put one of our team onto responding to all the enquires.
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Briefed our friends at Moneypenny who handle our calls – thanks ladies for your help.
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Put a post on our website explaining what had happened.
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Emailed our mailing list explaining what we know, and to contact their IT departments straight away if they’ve received the emails and NOT TO CLICK ON THE LINKS
Last night we had confirmation that the issue had been contained almost immediately because of the speed at which we responded.
Obviously it made me feel sick, but it just shows, even with regular screening of our systems, the baddies can attack.
Here are my top three tips which helped us to be able to respond so quickly yesterday.
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Have a plan – we did, we put it into action immediately we were made aware of an issue.
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Get a good cyber person in your address book, have their contact details ready. Scouting around for the details of someone you know and trust when you’re in the middle of an attack wastes valuable time. Happy to share the details of my guy if you want to get in touch.
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Know what you’re going to say to people. The approach I took was I wanted to protect people hence the communications with people who might be affected. When anything goes wrong, the gut reaction may be to keep things quiet and not acknowledge there has been a problem. However, our firm view is that being open and honest when issues crop up is by far and away the best approach. You can’t learn from something if it’s swept under the carpet. Knowing the approach I was going to take enabled me to draft the wording quickly and get the message out. (In hindsight, I could have prepared it in advance just in case)
Fingers crossed you never have a day like we did yesterday, but having a plan in advance will have you better prepared.
And I’m not gonna lie, I had a little cry when I had a lovely understanding email from a client, and I did break my alcohol free period with a few glasses of pink wine!
Photo by Bermix Studio on Unsplash