Description
Disaster Recovery Plan
As a result of the Covid‐19 lockdown and the associated increased adoption of the working from home model, many companies have had to restructure their IT, leading to changes in working methods and processes and potentially creating new vulnerabilities in IT security. In addition, working from home workplaces open up new gateways for hackers. Thus, hacker attacks increased substantially in the course of the pandemic. However, not only during the pandemic, but also before, companies and public institutions became victims of hacker attacks, which led to the “lockdown” of IT and the inability of organizations to act. Especially when operations come to a standstill within seconds, there must be an appropriate recovery plan that allows organizations to restart in a timely manner.
When Justus Liebig University Giessen was forced into a shutdown at the beginning of December 2019 by a hacker attack using the Emotet malware, no one could have guessed its extent. Apparently, the existing emergency plan was not designed for such serious crises and the shutdown lasted several weeks. Also affected by Emotet in mid‐May 2019 was the Heise Medien Gruppe, publisher of c’t magazine, where the IT infrastructure had to be completely rebuilt or partially sorted out.
But many small industrial companies and service providers are also affected on a daily basis by cybercrime and IT emergencies of various origins and types.
A disaster recovery plan, set up and practiced specifically for the company, helps to reduce the extent of damage in an emergency.
