CMS Security Handbook: The Comprehensive Guide for WordPress®, Joomla!®, Drupal™, and Plone®

Crisis Communication to the User Community

During a crisis, a person's comprehension level drops by several degrees. The need to communicate about a disaster in simple terms is important when conveying important information.

Although you probably won't be faced with a large population of people during a hacking event, you might face a lot of support calls or tickets. Learning to speak to these people on a lower comprehension level is vital. This is not to be confused with a drop in intelligence points, but rather means that you must understand that a sufficient distraction occurs in people's minds during a disaster. Preparing your disaster plan ahead of time to include a communications or messaging protocol can help with smooth communications to all stakeholders throughout the life of an outage.

Planning Your Communications

One way to help facilitate the restoration could be to put up a simple “maintenance” message, which will prevent unnecessary interruptions. Other items used to communicate may be scripts to be followed at a telephone call center. If you run a call center, putting up an Inbound Voice Recording (IVR) will help your clients understand that there's a problem and they should be patient. You may have a forum or blog that you can use to provide updates to your community.

With that said, the following three categories of communication are very important:

• Announcement of the incident
• Communications during the incident
• Post-incident communications

Prepare ahead of time ...