How to Build an Effective Incident Response Communication Plan

According to the ITRC Annual Data Breach Report, over 1.3 billion victim notices were sent to U.S. consumers in 2024, with 3,158 total compromises in the same year. Due to the continued high risk of successful data breaches and cyber attacks from bad actors, organizations must make cybersecurity even more of a priority in the years to come.

To strengthen your organization’s cybersecurity efforts, develop an incident response communication plan to ensure you properly communicate information to internal teams and external stakeholders when a cyber incident occurs.

Here are six steps to help you get started.

6 Steps to Create an Incident Response Communication Plan

Incident response plans aim to establish the roles, responsibilities, and steps needed to manage a cybersecurity incident. While incident response plans won’t prevent cyber attacks from occurring, they can significantly reduce the negative impact of successful attacks, protect even more sensitive data from being accessed, and help your organization reestablish its security posture and resume operations faster.

An incident response communication plan is a subcategory of incident response plans focused on how communications are handled during and after a cyber attack. 

1. Form a Team (With a Designated Point of Contact)

The first step to creating an effective incident response plan is to create an incident response team made up of stakeholders across your organization. Members of this team will have specific communication roles to play before, during, and after a cybersecurity incident. Common roles include IT team members, incident responders, executive sponsors, forensic analysts, external consultants, and legal representatives.

The most important role to establish for an incident response communication team is an incident response point of contact for your organization. Since a successful cyber attack will likely cause customers, stakeholders, regulators, and members of the media to have lots of questions, you’ll need to designate a point person for external communications. This person will ensure your organization has a consistent message and a single point of contact for all stakeholder questions. 

A good designated point of contact for incident response communications will usually have some technical knowledge, but they should be able to communicate information to non-tech-focused stakeholders in an easy-to-understand manner. At larger organizations, you might have an entire incident response communications team to handle the higher workload of communicating with a large number of stakeholders.

2. Identify Important Stakeholders and Create Notification Procedures

During and after a cyber incident, key shareholders should be informed about the incident. Stakeholders who need to be informed of a cyber incident often include: 

• Executives 
• Regulatory bodies 
• Internal teams 
• External partners
• Media partners
• Customers  

After establishing your key stakeholders, you’ll want to identify the types of information each stakeholder should receive and create notification procedures for alerting stakeholders about the cyber incident. Make sure you’ve documented notification procedures for each stakeholder, as the type of information and manner of communication will likely vary. These procedures should include when and how stakeholders should be alerted, alongside identifying who’s responsible for communicating relevant information to them.

The Role of an Incident Response Communication Matrix

This type of matrix will allow you to quickly assess and categorize cyber incidents based on their severity and importance. With a matrix, your communication team can quickly determine the severity of an incident and whether stakeholders need to be alerted. 

For instance, minor incidents may only need to be communicated to affected customers, while major incidents will likely need to be communicated to customers, law enforcement, and other stakeholders.

3. Establish Internal Communication Policies 

Alongside identifying policies for interacting with stakeholders outside of your incident response team, you should establish internal communication policies. These policies will outline how your incident response team should be notified of a cyber incident and any best practices for communications your response team should follow. 

Make sure your communication policies involve providing relevant information to HR and legal teams, as some incidents could result in criminal investigations and charges. 

4. Create Communication Channels

During a cybersecurity incident, internal communications could be affected, so organizations often rely on out-of-band incident response communication solutions. These solutions provide an additional communication channel for your company that isn’t connected to your company’s network. Since the channel isn’t a part of your network, you can ensure communications are secure and working properly.

Alongside using an out-of-band incident response communication solution, you should establish other communication channels for communication with stakeholders. 

For example, typical communication channels include social media, text messages, emails, and phone calls. Knowing when and how these communication channels should be used will give your incident response team clear policies for how to communicate with stakeholders.

5. Consult with a Lawyer About Your Incident Response Communication Plan

 The Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency recommends consulting a lawyer about your incident response plan. This recommendation can also apply to your communication response plan, as lawyers can advise your point of contact on how to communicate with law enforcement and other key stakeholders. Taking their advice can prevent legal issues and better tailor your communications to law enforcement and government agencies.

6. Receive Executive Approval

Once you’ve created a communication team, established policies, and created various communication channels, you can share this information with your company’s executives for approval. 

It’s best to present a simplified version of your communication response plan to executives, as they probably will benefit most from a high-level understanding of processes and the key communication points to assess the incident response team’s efficacy.

Choose Mattermost for Out-of-Band Incident Response Communication Solutions

While you create your incident response communication plan, you need an out-of-band response solution to keep internal communications secure during an attack. As a single-tenant, purpose-built collaboration platform designed to protect and accelerate communications, Mattermost can help. 

Our platform makes it easy to keep your incident response team’s comms separated from the enterprise-wide infrastructure they’re responsible for protecting. Learn more about our out-of-band incident response solutions today.