When Cyberwar Hits the Corporate Home Front

As recent events indicate, American companies may be the subject of destructive data “wiper” attacks and potential data theft by Iran-linked hackers. Ongoing tensions in the Middle East underscore the stark and evolving cyberthreat landscape facing companies.  These types of cyberattacks blend the regulatory and litigation exposure of a traditional data breach with the extreme business risks associated with near total operational disruption.  This alert highlights potential legal implications and outlines practical steps companies should consider to strengthen preparedness.

Risk of Operational Disruption and the Need for Incident Preparedness

Destructive cyberattacks—including “wiper” attacks like the one reported this week—pose a significant and often underestimated risk of operational disruption. Unlike a traditional data breach, a wiper attack is designed not merely to exfiltrate information but to destroy it, rendering critical systems, applications, and data repositories unusable. The resulting operational paralysis can halt manufacturing, disrupt supply chains, prevent access to essential business records, and impair an organization’s ability to communicate internally and externally at a time when rapid coordination is most critical. Companies should therefore treat operational resilience as an integral component of their cyberincident preparedness posture.

This includes, at a minimum, the following considerations that require immediate attention now, before an incident hits:

Out-of-Band Communications Planning. Organizations should establish and test out-of-band communications channels—that is, communications pathways that do not depend on the organization’s primary IT infrastructure. In the immediate aftermath of a destructive attack, corporate email systems, messaging platforms, and internal collaboration tools may be entirely unavailable or compromised. Incident response teams, senior leadership, legal counsel, and key business stakeholders should have pre-arranged methods of contacting one another—such as personal mobile numbers, encrypted messaging applications, or dedicated satellite communications—to enable rapid coordination when primary systems are compromised.

Backup and Restoration Planning. Companies should evaluate the adequacy of their data backup strategies, including the frequency of backups, the physical and logical separation of backup environments from primary systems, and the organization’s capability to restore operations from those backups within a defined recovery time objective. Wiper attacks specifically target the availability and integrity of data, and an organization’s resilience to such an attack depends heavily on whether it maintains immutable, offline, or otherwise segmented backup copies that cannot be reached by the attacker.

Business Continuity and Crisis Management. Organizations should ensure they have comprehensive business continuity plans that contemplate extended outages of critical IT systems. They should conduct tabletop exercises of these plans, likely with the involvement of outside counsel, to understand the strength of their preparedness. These plans should address manual workarounds for essential business functions, prioritization of system recovery, pre-negotiated arrangements with third-party incident response and forensic vendors, and clearly defined roles and escalation procedures for crisis management teams. Business continuity plans should also be integrated with the organization’s legal response playbook so that regulatory notifications, litigation holds, insurance claims, and stakeholder communications can proceed even while systems remain offline.

Vendor and Supply Chain Resilience. Given that many organizations depend on third-party vendors for critical operations, incident preparedness should extend to understanding the operational impact of a vendor’s systems being destroyed or rendered unavailable for an extended period. Companies should assess whether their vendor contracts address business continuity obligations, disaster recovery standards, and the vendor’s responsibility to maintain and test its own backup and restoration capabilities.

The Iran-linked attack reported this week is a stark reminder that modern cyberthreats are not limited to data theft. Companies that have focused their incident response planning exclusively on personal data breach notification and data-subject remediation should urgently expand their preparedness to encompass the full spectrum of operational disruption scenarios that destructive cyberattacks present.