The sudden appearance of a ransomware demand on a company’s network screens can instantly paralyze operations, transforming a typical business day into an existential crisis that demands immediate and decisive leadership. This abrupt shift from routine to recovery raises a critical question within the executive suite: who is in charge? This article aims to explore the nuanced and interlocking responsibilities of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) in the chaotic aftermath of a ransomware attack. By examining their distinct priorities and collaborative potential, readers can gain a clear understanding of how effective leadership is structured not around a single individual, but around a partnership built on preparation and shared objectives.
Key Questions or Key Topics Section
Who Takes the Initial Lead When Ransomware Is Discovered
In the first disorienting moments of a ransomware attack, the question of leadership is less about a formal title and more about immediate, informed action. The initial response is frequently triggered by the person who discovers the breach, but the operational lead should quickly transition to the individual with the most relevant expertise. While a CIO may be alerted to a system outage, the CISO’s domain is security, making them the natural point person for validating the threat and initiating containment protocols. The objective is not to establish a rigid hierarchy but to empower the right expertise at the right time. This initial phase demands a security-first mindset to prevent further damage.
This is where a philosophy of decisive action becomes paramount. Security experts advocate for a three-pronged approach: confirm, contain, and anchor. The first step is to definitively confirm the nature and scope of the attack, moving beyond hypothesis to understand the true blast radius. Too many organizations waste the critical first hour debating the reality of the situation. Simultaneously, containment must begin. This involves isolating compromised systems to cripple the attacker’s ability to move laterally across the network. Only after containment is underway should broader communication begin, anchoring every subsequent decision to core business functions. Zachary Lewis, both CIO and CISO at the University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy, cautions that a common mistake is to immediately jump into troubleshooting or disaster recovery, which can inadvertently destroy crucial forensic evidence needed to understand the attack vector.
What Are the First Three Steps an Organization Should Take
Once an attack is confirmed, a methodical and rapid response is essential to mitigate the damage. The first and most critical step is containment. This means taking immediate action to stop the bleeding, which could involve pulling internet connectivity to halt data exfiltration or isolating affected network segments. Chris Reffkin, chief security and risk officer at Fortra, emphasizes that teams must be empowered with clear authority to take these drastic measures without hesitation, as it is far easier to bring systems back from a controlled shutdown than to restore them from encrypted backups. This decisive action prevents the attacker from gaining a deeper foothold, effectively stopping their momentum and limiting the scope of the incident.
The second step involves communication and escalation, but with a strategic sequence. Before sending out an all-hands email or notifying customers, the incident response team and executive leadership must be briefed. According to Zachary Lewis, this internal alignment allows leaders to begin processing the event and making strategic decisions. Crucially, all communications about the incident should be moved to an out-of-band channel, such as personal Gmail accounts or a dedicated Slack instance. This assumes that internal systems like email and chat have been compromised, preventing attackers from monitoring the response team’s actions. After containment and internal alignment, the third step is to engage external experts. This means immediately contacting the organization’s cyber insurance provider, who will have a specific protocol to follow and can provide access to essential resources like forensic investigators, threat negotiators, and legal counsel specializing in cyber incidents. Concurrently, involving law enforcement agencies like the FBI or CISA within the first hour can provide invaluable support and guidance.
How Do the Priorities of a CIO and CISO Differ During an Attack
While both the CIO and CISO share the ultimate goal of restoring the organization, their immediate priorities and approaches diverge significantly, reflecting their core responsibilities. When working in harmony, this difference creates a balanced and effective response. The CIO’s perspective is intrinsically tied to business operations and continuity. Their primary concern is minimizing downtime and restoring revenue-generating functions as quickly as possible. As Brian Blakley, CISO at Bellini Capital, notes, a good CIO will ask which systems make the company money and demand that recovery efforts focus on those revenue-critical systems first. Their focus is on the “forward” motion of the business, enabling manual or alternative processes to keep cash flow alive while technical recovery is underway.
In contrast, the CISO’s priorities are rooted in security, forensics, and threat eradication. They are focused on understanding the mechanics of the attack: How did the intruders get in? Is sensitive data being actively exfiltrated? Do the attackers still have a backdoor into the network? The CISO’s team is responsible for the meticulous work of analyzing logs, identifying malicious accounts, and ensuring that the threat is fully neutralized before systems are restored. Zachary Lewis highlights this parallel structure, explaining that the CIO’s team can be standing up critical systems in a clean environment while the CISO’s team performs forensic analysis on the compromised ones. Rushing to restore over encrypted systems without this analysis could not only destroy evidence but also allow the attacker to reinfect the network as soon as it comes back online.
Why Is Preparedness More Important Than a Rigid Playbook
Many organizations invest heavily in creating detailed, prescriptive incident response playbooks, believing they are a silver bullet for handling a crisis. However, cybersecurity leaders increasingly warn that rigid playbooks can be more of a hindrance than a help. The reality is that no two ransomware attacks are identical, and a plan designed for a specific scenario will almost never match the unique circumstances of a real-world event. Brian Blakley asserts that most playbooks are thrown out within the first fifteen minutes of an incident because they lack the flexibility to adapt to the fluid, chaotic nature of an attack. The effort to force a real-world crisis into a predetermined script wastes precious time and can lead to poor decision-making.
Consequently, the focus is shifting from static playbooks toward building adaptable capabilities and muscle memory. Instead of a rigid script, organizations should develop a set of reusable components or modules that can be assembled on the fly to address the situation at hand. This approach values adaptability over prescription. The most effective way to build this adaptability is through regular practice. Both Zachary Lewis and Chris Reffkin are strong proponents of conducting tabletop exercises with the entire executive team. These simulations force leaders to think through difficult decisions in a low-stakes environment. They uncover gaps in communication, clarify roles, and test assumptions about recovery priorities. These exercises prepare a team not just to follow a plan, but to think critically and collaboratively under extreme pressure, which is far more valuable than any document.
Who Should Arbitrate Priorities During Recovery
During a ransomware incident, the pressure to restore services can create intense competition for resources, with different departments and executives advocating for their own systems to be prioritized. This can lead to a chaotic recovery effort driven by influence rather than strategic business need. A CIO might focus on enterprise-wide infrastructure, while a sales leader demands the CRM be restored immediately. To prevent this, a clear and impartial process for arbitrating these competing priorities is essential for an orderly and effective restoration. Without a designated decision-maker, the recovery process can become fragmented and inefficient, prolonging the outage and increasing business impact.
To solve this challenge, Chris Reffkin proposes a specific and powerful solution: appoint a single executive—who is not the CEO, CIO, or CISO—to serve as the arbiter of priority. This designated leader can take a holistic view of the business, evaluating requests based on pre-established business impact analyses and recovery time objectives (RTOs) rather than internal politics or the volume of requests. This structure allows the CIO and CISO to remain focused on their respective technical and security tasks without being pulled into political debates. The arbiter’s role is to ensure that the restoration sequence genuinely reflects the organization’s most critical functions, such as those that drive revenue or maintain customer trust. This approach transforms the recovery from a reactive scramble into a strategic, business-aligned operation.
Summary or Recap
The effective management of a ransomware attack is not a matter of a single leader taking charge but rather a dynamic partnership between the CIO and CISO. Their roles, while distinct, are fundamentally complementary. The CISO’s immediate focus is on the security dimension, leading efforts to confirm, contain, and investigate the breach to prevent further damage and ensure the threat is fully eradicated. This work often involves preserving forensic evidence and analyzing the attacker’s methods to close vulnerabilities. It is a meticulous process that prioritizes security and thoroughness to prevent a recurrence of the attack once systems are restored.
Simultaneously, the CIO champions the cause of business continuity, orchestrating the restoration of critical operational systems with a keen eye on revenue and customer impact. This role requires anchoring every decision in business logic, prioritizing the recovery of systems that keep the company functioning and generating income. This parallel effort ensures that while the security team is neutralizing the threat, the business itself is being carefully rebuilt. True resilience, however, is forged long before an attack occurs. Preparation through regular tabletop exercises, developing adaptable response capabilities instead of rigid playbooks, and establishing clear decision-making frameworks are what ultimately determine an organization’s ability to navigate the crisis swiftly and successfully.
Conclusion or Final Thoughts
Ultimately, the debate over whether the CIO or CISO should lead a ransomware response revealed a more sophisticated truth: the challenge required not a monarch, but a council. It became clear that success was predicated on a leadership duet, where the CIO’s focus on business continuity and the CISO’s command of security forensics were performed in concert. Their collaboration, guided by a pre-established framework and arbitrated by a neutral business leader, transformed a potentially chaotic reaction into a structured and strategic recovery. The most resilient organizations were not those with the thickest playbook, but those that had cultivated adaptability and clear communication channels through relentless practice.
Every organization should use these insights as a catalyst for introspection. The experience detailed by these experts provided a clear map of the pitfalls and best practices associated with modern cyber crises. Businesses must now ask themselves if their own incident response plans account for this dual leadership structure and whether they have empowered their teams with the authority to act decisively. Initiating a tabletop exercise in the coming months could be the single most valuable step an organization could take, as it is in the simulated calm of practice that the resilience needed to survive the storm of a real attack is truly built.
