Stefan Würtemberger, Vice President Information Technology at Marabu Inks, will give a presentation on the impact of cyber attacks on businesses entitled And Suddenly It Burns Without Fire on Wednesday, November 10 from 10:10 am to 10:30 am at Cybersecurity Leadership Summit 2021.

To give you a sneak preview of what to expect, we asked Stefan some questions about his presentation.

Could you give us a sneak peek into your Keynote: “And Suddenly It Burns Without Fire - Impact of Cyber Attacks on Your Business”?

Yeah, you can expect how a company has massive problems and you can't see it. You will get the feeling how an IT department has to work to fight against hackers and restore the company's business. We will dive into incident and recovery management and afterwards we make a recap about lessons learned and go into preparation for the next attacks.

What are the most important experiences in dealing with cyber-attacks?

There are a lot of things you have to expect. The most critical thing is how the company reacts. You don't know what to do and when you don't have emergency planning, you have to handle that. And the most important thing is that you don't have fears about the cyber-attack. It’ll go away, and you won’t have a lot of fun in these times. It's the most horrible time for IT, when you have a cyber-attack.

How do you counter them and what can you do to prepare yourself?

We counter cyber-attacks in a couple of KPIs. We measure how much traffic we have, how many incidents we have in the company, and the preparation is much easier. You have to speak a lot with your colleagues, with the employees and prepare them how to handle and to work in a cyber-attack. And also, once they make errors by clicking links, how they should react and inform the business leaders and IT department to be prepared that we know that we could have the next cyber-attack.

What does it look like when it happens a second time and what are the lessons learned?

When a cyber-attack is in progress, the first impression is: you do nothing about it and you see that systems are not working correctly, and that's the horrible time for IT. In the progress of a cyber-attack, you see clearly how it comes and how it works from the attacker side and you fight against them, that the business is coming back to normal operation and the preparation is then to see how they come into the company, and then you have to prepare your business and the IT that you know where they're coming through and you close the doors and you prepare your network to the next level of IT security with certain technology, but also with the knowledge of the people and the awareness that it could happen any time and in any location and in every certain day.