What’s Your “After Action” Plan?

Published on 15th August 2024 Author: Rob Black

It shouldn’t have been a problem. After all, what could possibly go wrong helping a vacationing neighbor whose plants need watering?

But something did.

I got a panicked call from my wife: “Rob, I fell. I’m next door in the backyard.”

Apparently, Rachel’s ankle gave out as she was walking down the back steps from our neighbor’s house.

At least, that’s her story. I’m wondering if all this Olympic watching had her trying some kind of Yurchenko Double Pike (or whatever) out the back door.

In any case, I ran next door, lifted Rachel, stuck her in the car, and drove to the emergency room. Three short hours later, she hobbled out on crutches with an aircast for her badly sprained ankle.

Fortunately, things are steadily improving. Over the past couple of days, her ankle has progressed from looking like it had a baseball in it, to a golf ball, to “fat foot,” to what we now refer to as “chubby foot.” (I know what you’re thinking: the medical industry could learn a lot from this cybersecurity guy.)

Not surprisingly, we have had several discussions about the event.

Rachel’s point of view: “I can’t believe I did that.”

Rob’s point of view: “It could have been much worse.”

The way I see it, it’s a good thing…

… she had her phone

… I was home

… she didn’t hit her head

… it was the bottom stair, not the top one

… it was sprained, not broken

… we live near an emergency room

… she married an athletic powerhouse with the strength to pick her up and carry her to the car

Rach sees something that could have been avoided. I think about all the things that prevented a bad situation from becoming a terrible one.

Either way, and to improve future outcomes, we took some steps and made some mental notes:

We ordered more elastic bandage wraps to replace the one we used
We noted the importance of always having a cell phone with us
We now know which door is the correct door to the hospital emergency room (oops)
Rach probably shouldn’t wear flip flops as much. (Not discussed, but she will read this and see my suggestion. I love you, honey!)

As it turns out, these types of “after action reviews” are useful for non-ankle-related things, too.

Reduce Your Risk Before the Next Incident

I’m guessing you heard about last month’s CrowdStrike incident in which a content update brought more than eight million Windows machines offline, causing disruption to airline, banking, healthcare, government, and industry operations worldwide.

Most of our clients did not experience any impact. But I participated in an after action session of a client that did — it was a great discussion.

What impressed me most was my client’s commitment to transparency and accountability. There were definitely some mistakes made, but they did not try to hide or sugarcoat them. They acknowledged what they did right and were not afraid to point out and discuss what went wrong. (Not surprisingly, they were back up and running within half a day.)

The output of the session had a lot of technical details that you probably don’t care about (more here if you do). But the structure of their approach is worth noting and borrowing from. They created a written report in the following format:

Summary
Impact — what systems and processes were affected?
Timeline — what happened, exactly, and when?
Lessons Learned
- What went well?
- What went wrong?
- Where did we get lucky? (Or, as I prefer to say, “Where did our hard work pay off?”)
Action items — these ranged from highly technical configuration changes to the nontechnical, but critical, ensuring that everyone’s telephone number is correctly stored in the company database.

Here are some additional, generic takeaways for everyone, regardless of the size or type of business you operate…

Agents are scary. They are on all your machines and typically have administrative access. Perform due diligence on all vendors with this capability.
Shut down your laptops every night. This simple step protects against malicious updates and other bad-guy things that may occur while you are gone.
Establish backup communication channels. It’s fine to use network-based means for staying in touch with your team (Slack, Microsoft Teams, etc.). But if your network and connected computers are all down, you are going to regret not having your team members’ phone numbers or other channels of communication available.
“All-at-once” is super-risky. One thing that compounded the seriousness of the CrowdStrike incident was that the update was pushed out worldwide, at the same time. Taking a “waved” approach, in which you can investigate early failures and correct as needed, is a much better idea. If possible, do the first waves in close geographic proximity (in case you need to roll a truck to fix) or with low-risk computers.
Hire quality humans. When things go wrong, you need people who will do whatever it takes, for however long it takes, to find the problem and fix it. The best companies were back up and running within a day or two … not because of their technology, but (mostly) because a few heroic employees did what needed to be done. Others were not so fortunate (I’m looking at you, Delta Airlines).

A Cautionary Tale

If the CrowdStrike incident had no direct impact on your business, I’m glad to hear it. But consider yourself fortunate, not immune. This kind of thing could have happened with many other vendors on many other platforms.

To keep risk to a minimum, take precautions as best you can and be willing to have open and honest after-action discussions with your team when things go wrong. Oh, and maybe don’t wear flip flops as often.

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Rob Black, CISSP

Rob founded Fractional CISO in 2017 and has helped dozens of companies improve their security posture as a vCISO. He consults, speaks, and writes on IoT and security. Rob has held product security and corporate security leadership positions at PTC ThingWorx, Axeda and RSA Security. He received his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management and holds two Bachelor of Science degrees from Washington University in St. Louis in Computer Science and System Science and Engineering. He is also a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP).