Antivirus Maker’s Crisis Management for Data Breach

Jonathan Bernstein crisis communications, crisis management, crisis public relations, Crisis Response, cyber security, cyber threats, Cyberheist, cybersecurity, Erik Bernstein, hackers, hacking, internet crisis management, internet security, Jonathan Bernstein, public relations, reputation management Leave a Comment

More proof that nobody is invulnerable to cyber attacks

In the last Crisis Manager of 2013, we predicted cyber crises would explode this year, and explode they have. What was once a fringe crime that often went unnoticed by both victims and the media has become big business, and it seems every week a cyber attack is making headlines.

The target of the latest high-profile hack was popular antivirus firm Avast, and the take was the login IDs and passwords of more than 400,000 users of the company’s community support forums. In response, the forum was taken offline, and CEO Vincent Steckler posted the following on the Avast blog:

Avast hack response blog post

A tech company CEO actually expressing compassion in his crisis communications? Someone’s been paying attention (other than we would have advised him to build compassion into his first paragraph instead of waiting for the end).  ! Overall this was quality crisis management messaging, answering the who, what, where, when and why, as well as a hat-tip to the feelings of stakeholders. If we had to nitpick, we would say to bring the compassion in earlier in the post. Done that way, stakeholders would be in a more receptive frame of mind for the rest of the message.

The BCM Blogging Team
https://www.bernsteincrisismanagement.com

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