We are living in a time when cyberattacks are very common, and no company or user is free from the risk of being targeted. More and more, companies are improving their protection, and users are becoming more aware of these threats.
However, as we mentioned, this doesn’t guarantee that we won’t be attacked or that an attack won’t succeed.
Having recovery measures in place is essential to respond to such attacks and restore our infrastructure to the state it was in immediately before the attack.
But is that enough? Is simply recovering our data enough for everything to be forgotten?
The Importance of Restoring a Company’s Digital Reputation After a Cyberattack
After an attack, there are moments of uncertainty and doubt, as we don’t fully know the consequences or the extent to which our systems have been affected.
Everything becomes clearer in the medium term, once we have spent some time working with the restored systems.
Another aspect we need to devote time to is understanding how an attack of this kind affects the company’s reputation. This is what’s known as the Company’s Digital Reputation.
A cyberattack can harm us in different ways, the most important being:
- Business interruption.
- Website or online store outage.
- Failure of technological services such as email, online payments or collections, invoicing, etc.
- Inability to access important company documents.
All of this can be aggravated if the cyberattack also involves financial fraud or an inability to recover data due to missing or faulty backups, or a lack of means to rebuild our network infrastructure.
On the other hand, let’s imagine everything went well after the cyberattack—we recovered our data, suffered no financial fraud, and our systems are working properly.
Digital Reputation at Risk
It’s very likely that during the time systems were down, some clients, suppliers, or individuals who wanted to contact our company were unable to do so and became aware of the cyberattack.
This can cause serious damage to the company’s image—sometimes even more severe than the business interruption itself—because it directly impacts the company’s reputation.
But not all is lost. What can we do to recover from that bad image?
Recovering the company’s digital reputation
There are several ways to do this, and it all comes down to researching on the web and trying to counter negative comments and clean up our image:
- Review the information published on our company’s website. An important task is to make sure our company is not associated with negative comments that could affect our daily operations. Search using the company’s name, look for websites that might compromise our image, and identify associations with harmful elements. This investigative task can be done even if we have not been attacked and serves as good image hygiene for our company.
- Identify fake news about the company. Another form of attack is spreading false news about our company. This may come from a competitor trying to damage our reputation and gain an advantage in our sector. It often happens even if we haven’t been attacked, so we must stay alert and counter these stories by debunking them.
- Use legal resources, make our defenses known. All this aims to restore our reputation. A cyberattack can even serve as an opportunity to be reborn and show that, although we were attacked, we managed to carry on without suffering major consequences and without any data breaches that could impact third parties. If handled well, we can even turn that information to our advantage.
Read also Security Alert: Is your company safe from an attack?
Staying Prepared
Every day we hear news about companies suffering attacks, the effects they face, and the possible loss or leakage of data.
We may recover from this, but then comes the struggle against potential damage to the company’s reputation.
For this reason, we must also stay alert, analyze the consequences, and work to reverse them in order to come out stronger and demonstrate the minimal or null impact of an attack.
At ABD Consulting and IT Solutions we stay attentive to your needs and questions.
You can reach us through any of our usual channels, and we are ready to respond and assist you.