As a crisis communications specialist, Jeff Gaunt works alongside companies to plot every imaginable crisis and develop a plan to get through it with minimal damage.
The blueprint looks a little different when that crisis is a cyberattack or data breach.
“In many cases, cybersecurity becomes its own lane,” said Gaunt, a senior director at Grand Rapids-based PR agency Lambert & Co. who also leads the firm’s crisis and reputation management practice. “A company may have a protocol for everything that could go wrong except for cyber, and cyber is handled differently.”
With cyberattacks and data breaches becoming an ever-present threat to companies, business owners find themselves in need of a comprehensive action plan to sort through the fallout. Communication is a key component of those plans.
In his role, Gaunt — who has also spoken on crisis communication at a number of cybersecurity conferences — has worked alongside clients affected by everything from an email phishing attack to the infiltration of advanced malware.
He acknowledged how the response to a cyberattack might deviate from the traditional blueprint of crisis communication.
“Usually when you’re in a crisis or incident, you need to be able to communicate very fast,” Gaunt said. “There is an expectation on the part of the customer or suppliers or business partners that you let them know what’s going on. But with cyberattacks, often there is investigation that needs to take place — sometimes internal, sometimes you’re pulling in third-party cybersecurity experts. But there is a process you need to go through and that takes time.”
The blueprint
As with most other brands of crisis, Gaunt stress ..
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