Cyber Disaster Recovery Plan Template

Standard Operating Procedure: Cyber Disaster Recovery (CDR)

Template Registry | Engineering Division

---

1. Document Control Block

---

2. Executive Summary & Purpose

This document establishes the technical mandate for recovering enterprise assets following a catastrophic cyber event (e.g., ransomware, unauthorized exfiltration, or infrastructure compromise). The purpose is to restore core services to a known-good state with minimal RTO (Recovery Time Objective) and RPO (Recovery Point Objective), ensuring business continuity while maintaining forensic integrity.

---

3. Scope & Prerequisites

• Scope: Cloud environments (AWS/Azure/GCP), On-prem data centers, and endpoint fleets.
• Prerequisites:
  • Off-site/Immutable backup repositories (WORM storage).
  • Out-of-band communication channel (Signal/Threema).
  • Privileged Access Management (PAM) vault credentials.
  • Validated "Gold Images" (Infrastructure-as-Code templates).

---

4. Roles & Responsibilities (RACI)

---

5. Step-by-Step Procedure

Phase I: Triage & Containment

• Verify incident severity against the Cyber Incident Response Plan (CIRP).
• Isolate compromised network segments via VLAN segregation or security group updates.
• Revoke global administrative tokens and rotate service account secrets.
• Preserve volatile memory (RAM) and disk snapshots for forensic analysis.

Phase II: Infrastructure Reconstruction

• Deploy "Clean Room" environment using automated IaC scripts (Terraform/CloudFormation).
• Validate integrity of immutable backups using checksum verification.
• Provision isolated management subnets for recovery testing.

Phase III: Service Restoration

• Restore Tier 0 services (Identity Providers, DNS, NTP, PAM).
• Restore Tier 1 applications (Database, Production APIs).
• Conduct vulnerability scans on restored instances before re-introducing to production.
• Synchronize differential data from the last known-good backup.

Phase IV: Verification & Sign-off

• Perform smoke tests on primary application endpoints.
• Execute User Acceptance Testing (UAT) with department leads.
• Formal "Clean Bill of Health" signed by the CISO/CTO.

---

6. Quality Assurance & Pro-Tips

• Best Practice: Maintain a "Break-Glass" account in a physical safe. Never rely on SSO during an identity-compromised event.
• Common Pitfall: Restoring infected backups. Always scan snapshots for dormant malware/logic bombs before mounting to the network.
• Metric Thresholds:
  • RTO: Max 4 hours for Tier 0 systems.
  • RPO: Max 15 minutes of data loss (Transactional DBs).
• Pro-Tip: Automate your "Infrastructure-as-Code" testing. If the code fails to deploy during a drill, it will fail during a disaster.

---

7. Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Should we pay the ransom to expedite recovery?

• A: No. Template Registry policy strictly prohibits ransom payment. It provides no guarantee of decryption and marks the firm as a recurring target.

Q: How do we handle "split-brain" scenarios during restoration?

• A: The primary database, as defined in the CMDB, is the authoritative source. All secondary nodes must be wiped and re-provisioned from the primary node to prevent data corruption.

Q: Can we skip the vulnerability scan to save time?

• A: Absolutely not. Restoring a compromised service without patching the entry vector will lead to a re-infection loop. Compliance/Security sign-off is mandatory for production re-entry.