What Really Happens During Cybersecurity Incident Response: 6 Misconceptions That Could Cost Your Business

When most business leaders think about cybersecurity incident response, they picture their IT team springing into action, fixing the problem, and getting everyone back to work. The reality is far more complex—and understanding these differences before a breach occurs can mean the difference between a manageable incident and a business-ending crisis.

If you’re a business leader, technology director, or part of an IT team at a small or mid-sized organization, this guide will walk you through what actually happens when cybersecurity incidents unfold. More importantly, we’ll address six critical misconceptions that leave many organizations underprepared when they need help most.

Why Understanding Incident Response Matters Now More Than Ever

Cybersecurity breaches aren’t just increasing—they’re becoming more sophisticated and costly. According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, while the global average cost of a data breach dropped to $4.44 million (down from $4.88 million in 2024), this decline masks significant regional variations and emerging threats. The United States saw breach costs surge to a record $10.22 million, driven by higher regulatory penalties and increased detection costs.

The challenge isn’t just about preventing breaches anymore. It’s about understanding how your organization will respond when—not if—an incident occurs. The gap between what business leaders expect during incident response and what actually happens can create confusion, delays, and significantly worse outcomes.

Let’s look at the realities that often surprise leadership teams when they’re facing their first major cybersecurity incident.

Misconception 1: Your IT Team Leads Incident Response

The Reality: Legal and Insurance Drive the Response

Here’s what catches most organizations off guard: when a significant cybersecurity breach occurs, your IT department typically doesn’t lead the response. Instead, your legal counsel and insurance carrier take the helm.

Why? Because cybersecurity incidents create immediate legal and financial exposures that extend far beyond technical remediation. Your legal team needs to address contractual obligations, regulatory requirements for breach notification, potential liability claims, and reputation management. Meanwhile, your cyber insurance carrier has a direct financial stake in how the incident is handled and resolved.

Think of it like a major flood in your building. Your facilities team doesn’t decide how repairs happen or who performs them—your insurance company does. They bring in their approved contractors, specify repair methods, and control the process because they’re managing payout exposure. Cybersecurity incident response works the same way.

Your cyber insurance carrier will typically engage their own incident response firm, which includes specialized IT security experts to handle containment, remediation, and forensic analysis. These external experts work alongside—but often direct—your internal IT team’s efforts.

What This Means for Your Organization:

Review your cyber insurance policy now, before an incident. Understand what incident response services are included, which vendors they work with, and what your obligations are. Your IT leaders should have direct contact with these partners before an emergency occurs.

Misconception 2: You’ll Know About Breaches Immediately When They Happen

The Reality: Breaches Often Go Undetected for Months

According to IBM’s 2025 report, organizations are getting faster at identifying and containing breaches, with the mean time dropping to 241 days (down from 258 days in 2024). While this represents significant improvement—reaching a nine-year low—it still means breaches go undetected for nearly eight months on average.

Even more concerning: the most disruptive part of many breaches only becomes visible after months of quiet surveillance, data theft, and system tampering by threat actors. The ransomware attack that locks your files? That’s often just the final act—a way for attackers to cover their tracks while throwing incident responders off the trail of what they really did.

Bad actors are patient. They’ll spend weeks or months inside your systems, mapping your network, identifying your most valuable data, establishing multiple access points, and carefully exfiltrating information. The visible “incident” is often just the dramatic exit, designed to distract from the real damage.

Why This Extended Timeline Happens:

Modern attack methods are sophisticated. Attackers use legitimate credentials, move slowly to avoid triggering alerts, and often work during off-hours when monitoring is less intensive. They’re not rushing—they’re methodical.

What This Means for Your Organization:

Detection capabilities matter more than ever. This includes security monitoring, logging, and the ability to analyze historical data when an incident is discovered. It also means that when you do discover an incident, you need forensic analysis to understand when the breach actually started and what happened during that window.

Misconception 3: “It Won’t Happen to Us” or “We Spend Enough on Security”

The Reality: Even Well-Funded Security Programs Face Breaches

Rob Joyce, former Cybersecurity Director at the NSA, famously noted that adversaries take the time to understand your IT systems better than you know them yourself. While your IT team is managing day-to-day operations, support tickets, and countless other responsibilities, threat actors can focus entirely on finding ways into your environment.

The gap between what your IT team intended to deploy and what’s actually running in your environment creates opportunities for attackers. Shadow IT, unsanctioned devices, unintentional configuration errors, and well-meaning but unsafe workarounds all create cracks in your defenses.

According to the Verizon 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report, 68% of breaches involved a human element, including social engineering attacks, errors, or misuse. These vulnerabilities exist even in organizations with significant security investments.

The longer a breach goes undetected, the more costly it becomes to remediate

The Asymmetric Challenge:

Your IT team is defending everything, all the time. Attackers only need to find one way in. They can be patient, dedicated, and entirely focused on their goal. This fundamental asymmetry means that even excellent IT teams with reasonable security budgets remain at risk.

What This Means for Your Organization:

Security is about managing risk, not eliminating it. The question isn’t whether you’re spending enough—it’s whether you understand your risks, have detection capabilities in place, and can respond effectively when incidents occur. Building relationships with security partners before you need them creates better outcomes than trying to manage everything in-house.

Misconception 4: IT Leaders Can Step Back Once External Responders Take Over

The Reality: IT Leadership Must Stay Actively Engaged

When your cyber insurance brings in their incident response team and your legal counsel starts managing breach notifications, IT leaders often think they can step back and let the experts handle it. This is a critical mistake.

Your CEO, board, and executive team will demand constant updates, explanations, and technical leadership throughout the incident. They’ll want to understand what happened, what’s being done about it, what’s at risk, and when operations can resume. These questions require IT leadership to remain deeply involved in the incident response process.

Furthermore, cybersecurity breaches have become one of the leading factors in shortened CIO tenures. According to various industry reports, security incidents can significantly impact technology leadership careers, making it essential that IT leaders maintain visibility, demonstrate competence, and actively contribute to resolution efforts throughout the response process.

Your IT Team’s Critical Role:

External incident responders are experts in forensics and remediation, but they don’t know your business, your systems’ quirks, your users’ workflows, or your operational requirements. Your IT team provides essential context that makes response efforts more effective and helps the organization recover more quickly.

What This Means for Your Organization:

Define roles before an incident occurs. Your IT leadership should understand how they’ll collaborate with external incident responders, what their communication responsibilities are to executive leadership, and how they’ll balance incident response with maintaining essential operations. This planning prevents confusion when everyone is under stress.

Misconception 5: “We’ll Never Pay a Ransom Because We Have Backups”

The Reality: Not All Backup Solutions Enable Rapid Business Continuity

Many organizations confidently tell themselves they’re protected from ransomware because they “have backups.” But having data backed up somewhere isn’t the same as having a true business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) solution that can get your business operational quickly.

The difference matters enormously when ransomware locks your systems. Can you restore your data? Probably. Can you restore it fast enough to avoid crippling business disruption? That’s a different question entirely.

Understanding RPO and RTO:

Two critical metrics determine your actual recovery capability:

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO): How much data can you afford to lose? If your backups run nightly, your RPO is up to 24 hours of lost work.
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO): How long can systems be down before business impact becomes critical? Minutes? Hours? Days?

These aren’t just technical metrics—they translate directly to dollars. According to IBM’s 2025 report, organizations are increasingly calculating the business impact of downtime, with many finding that extended outages can cost tens of thousands to millions of dollars per day, depending on the organization’s size and industry.

When Backups Aren’t Enough:

Having backups doesn’t guarantee you can:

• Restore data quickly enough to meet business needs
• Verify that restored data isn’t corrupted or compromised
• Rebuild complex system configurations and interdependencies
• Restore operations without significant business disruption

Some organizations discover during ransomware incidents that restoring from backups would take weeks, not days. Others find that their backups were encrypted along with their production systems. These scenarios force difficult decisions about ransom payment.

The Insurance Economics:

Here’s something that surprises many business leaders: sometimes cyber insurance companies will authorize ransom payments because it’s cheaper than the alternative. If executing your full BCDR plan would cost $500,000 and take three weeks, but paying a $150,000 ransom gets you back online in days, the insurance company may choose the ransom payment.

This isn’t a failure of the insurance company—it’s a business calculation based on total costs including recovery expenses, business interruption losses, and contractual penalties for extended downtime.

What This Means for Your Organization:

Test your backup and recovery capabilities regularly. Don’t just verify that backups complete successfully—actually restore data and systems in a test environment. Measure how long restoration takes and whether the restored systems work properly.

Calculate your actual RPO and RTO, and understand what they mean in lost revenue, productivity, and customer impact. Then invest in BCDR capabilities that align with your business requirements, not just what seems technically adequate.

Misconception 6: “Law Enforcement Will Save Us” or Take an Active Role

The Reality: Law Enforcement Serves a Different Purpose Than Most Expect

When many business leaders discover a cybersecurity breach, they assume they’ll immediately contact the FBI and that federal agents will swoop in to investigate, catch the criminals, and help recover their systems. While law enforcement plays an important role in cybersecurity, their involvement looks very different from what many organizations expect.

Law Enforcement as Social Deterrent:

Fundamentally, law enforcement serves as a social deterrent to bad actors and helps build cases against cybercriminal organizations over time. They’re not a rescue team that will immediately help you recover your operations or catch the specific criminals who attacked your organization.

When you report a cybersecurity incident to the FBI, your case likely becomes one of many they’re tracking as part of a larger investigation into a criminal group. They’re building long-term cases that may take months or years to result in arrests or prosecutions.

The International Jurisdiction Challenge:

Most cybercriminals operate from overseas, often from countries that don’t have extradition treaties with the United States or cooperative law enforcement relationships. Even when law enforcement identifies specific threat actors, getting court orders or making arrests across international borders can be extraordinarily time-consuming and complex.

The bad guys aren’t just down the street—they’re often operating from Eastern Europe, Asia, or other regions where US law enforcement has limited ability to act quickly.

Reputational Considerations:

Here’s something your legal team should consider carefully: involving law enforcement can trigger public records requirements, court filings, and other disclosures that may become public. Depending on your industry, customer base, and regulatory environment, this public attention may carry its own reputational risks.

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t involve law enforcement—many incidents legally require it, and their assistance can be valuable. But the decision of when to involve law enforcement, at what level, and in what capacity should be part of your incident response planning, not something you figure out in the middle of a crisis.

The 2025 report shows that fewer ransomware victims are involving law enforcement—only 40% of organizations reported doing so, down from 52% in 2024. This trend suggests organizations are weighing the benefits and drawbacks more carefully.

What This Means for Your Organization:

Work with your legal team now to understand the circumstances under which you’ll involve law enforcement. Consider factors like:

• Regulatory requirements for law enforcement notification in your industry
• Customer expectations around breach reporting
• Public relations implications of law enforcement involvement
• Potential benefits of FBI resources and threat intelligence

Set appropriate expectations with your leadership team. Law enforcement can provide valuable assistance with threat intelligence, investigation support, and long-term deterrence. They won’t typically recover your systems or immediately apprehend the criminals who attacked you.

How to Prepare Your Organization for Effective Incident Response

Understanding these misconceptions is just the first step. Here’s what you can do now to prepare your organization for better incident response:

Build Your Response Team Now

Don’t wait until an incident to figure out who does what. Identify your internal response team, including representatives from IT, legal, communications, HR, and executive leadership. Document everyone’s roles and communication protocols.

Review Your Cyber Insurance

Actually read your cyber insurance policy. Understand what’s covered, what services they provide, which incident response firms they work with, and what your obligations are. Consider scheduling a meeting with your broker and their recommended incident response provider before you need them.

Test Your BCDR Capabilities

Don’t just verify that backups complete—actually restore systems and data in a test environment. Measure your real RTO and RPO, calculate what they mean in business impact, and invest in improvements if your current capabilities don’t meet business needs.

Establish External Relationships

Connect with incident response firms, forensic specialists, and legal counsel who specialize in cybersecurity before an incident occurs. These relationships create faster response times and better outcomes when you’re in crisis mode.

Run Tabletop Exercises

Walk through realistic cybersecurity scenarios with all stakeholders, including ransomware attacks and data breaches. Test your decision-making processes around ransom payment, law enforcement notification, and customer communication. These exercises reveal planning gaps you can fix before facing a real incident.

Invest in Detection, Not Just Prevention

Given that breaches can still take over 240 days to identify and contain, detection capabilities are just as important as prevention. Security monitoring, logging, and analysis tools help you identify incidents earlier and understand their scope more quickly. The 2025 report shows that organizations using AI and automation extensively in their security operations saw significant improvements—cutting breach lifecycles by 80 days and reducing costs by $1.9 million compared to those not using these technologies.

Document Your Environment

Maintain accurate documentation of your IT environment, including network diagrams, system inventories, and data flow maps. This documentation becomes invaluable during forensic analysis and helps external responders understand your environment more quickly.

Scenario Plan Legal Considerations

Work with your legal team to map out different incident scenarios and when you’d involve law enforcement, how you’d handle breach notifications, and how you’d manage customer communications. These decisions are much harder to make under pressure.

Partners Who Stay Close When It Matters Most

At Vicinity, we’ve walked alongside organizations through cybersecurity incidents, and we understand how overwhelming the process can be. That’s why we believe in preparing our partners before incidents occur—not just showing up when something goes wrong.

We work with organizations throughout Alaska, Hawaii, and the Pacific Northwest to build realistic incident response capabilities that fit their size, industry, and risk profile. This includes connecting you with the right insurance partners, legal resources, incident response specialists, and helping you build BCDR capabilities that actually meet your business needs.

Whether you’re evaluating your current cybersecurity preparedness, testing your backup and recovery capabilities, reviewing your cyber insurance coverage, or want to run a tabletop exercise with your leadership team, we’re here to help you prepare. Because the best time to build your incident response plan is before you need it.

Ready to assess your incident response readiness? Reach out to schedule a conversation about your organization’s cybersecurity preparedness. We’ll help you understand your gaps and build relationships with the right partners—so when an incident occurs, you’re ready.

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Sources: IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report 2025, Verizon 2024 Data Breach Investigations Report