What is the distinct responsibility of a dedicated Crisis Management Team during a major cyber incident, differentiating it from the technical incident response team?

During a major cyber incident, the distinct responsibility of a dedicated Crisis Management Team (CMT) is to manage the overall organizational impact, strategic decision-making, and preservation of the organization's reputation and long-term viability, whereas the technical incident response team focuses on the hands-on technical remediation of the cyberattack itself. The technical incident response team, often referred to as the Incident Response Team (IRT), is primarily responsible for the immediate technical aspects of detecting, containing, eradicating, and recovering from the cyber incident. This includes activities such as analyzing malicious code, isolating affected systems, performing forensic investigations to understand the attack's scope and method, patching vulnerabilities, and restoring compromised data and systems from backups. Their expertise lies in cybersecurity technical domains like network security, system administration, and digital forensics, aiming to restore operational integrity as quickly and securely as possible. In contrast, the Crisis Management Team operates at a strategic, executive level. Its core responsibility is to assess and manage the broader business, legal, financial, reputational, and operational implications of the incident. This involves making critical, high-level decisions that affect the entire organization, such as whether to authorize system shutdowns that impact critical business functions, approve external communications with customers, partners, and the public, or engage legal counsel for regulatory compliance and potential litigation. The CMT coordinates cross-functional efforts involving legal, public relations, human resources, finance, and senior leadership, focusing on minimizing financial losses, maintaining customer trust, ensuring regulatory compliance, and protecting the organization's brand image. While the IRT provides crucial technical updates to the CMT, the CMT translates these technical realities into strategic actions and manages the non-technical facets of the crisis, ensuring that the organization navigates the incident in a manner that safeguards its reputation, meets its legal obligations, and ensures business continuity. The IRT's objective is to fix the technical problem; the CMT's objective is to manage the crisis that the technical problem created for the entire organization.