Opinion: The Management Warning Behind 'Do Not Shut Down' in Cybersecurity Incidents – Behavior is the Real Risk

On July 31, 115 (2026), the Cybersecurity Division of Taiwan's Digital Development Ministry released the 'Cybersecurity Incident Response Action Guidelines,' an extension of the 'Basic Cybersecurity Protection Guidelines for SMEs,' focusing on how enterprises can respond quickly, minimize damage, and resume operations after cybersecurity defenses fail.

Opening this guideline, the most notable aspect is not the increase in technical requirements, but a repeatedly emphasized reminder that defies common intuition: 'Do not shut down.' Whether a device is suspected of being infected by malicious software, hit by ransomware, or facing a denial-of-service attack, the guideline specifically warns against arbitrarily cutting power or forcibly restarting systems. For most employees, the first instinct upon seeing a computer malfunction is to 'try restarting it,' or even directly unplug the power, hoping to restore normal function.

However, in a cybersecurity incident scene, this seemingly reasonable action may actually increase the difficulty of subsequent handling. Volatile digital evidence stored in memory may be lost upon shutdown, reducing the chances of forensic analysis, attack tracing, and data recovery.

The regulatory authority's repeated emphasis on 'do not shut down' conveys an important message: when a cybersecurity incident occurs, the greatest risk for an enterprise is often not how sophisticated the hacker's attack method is, but whether the organization possesses the ability to transform policies into correct actions. This is precisely the core value of the guideline—cybersecurity response cannot merely be institutionalized and standardized; more importantly, policies must truly be transformed into employees' correct behaviors when facing incidents.

From Policy Establishment to Behavioral Implementation: A Critical Gap in Corporate Cybersecurity Governance

In the past, enterprises promoted cybersecurity management by focusing on institutional establishment, including formulating cybersecurity policies, establishing incident response procedures, conducting training, and verifying document completeness through audits. These efforts are certainly important, but enterprises often overlook a critical issue: does the existence of policies mean employees truly know how to execute them?

Imagine an administrative staff member discovers a ransomware message late at night, with all files inaccessible. What will their first action be? Will they immediately follow the response procedure—reporting internally, preserving the scene, and avoiding evidence destruction? Or, driven by anxiety and panic, will they shut down the system, delete files, and attempt to handle it themselves? Under pressure, most people do not take the textbook-standard answer, but rather the most intuitive reaction. Therefore, the real challenge in cybersecurity governance is not just establishing policies, but through training, scenario drills, and daily management, replacing incorrect instincts with correct behaviors. What enterprises truly need to manage is not just information security policies, but whether these policies can be transformed into correct behavioral patterns at critical moments.

The Speed of Cybersecurity Response: The First Minute Matters More Than Deadlines

The 'Cybersecurity Incident Response Action Guidelines' propose 'recommended timeframes for response milestones,' such as completing internal reporting within a certain time after detecting anomalies, and seizing the golden window to contact banks in cases involving financial fraud.

However, what enterprises truly need to focus on is not the 15-minute or 30-minute time standards, but what happens in the first minute. Because if the first person to detect an anomaly makes the wrong first move, all subsequent response processes may be affected, potentially turning a controllable incident into a major operational risk.

Cybersecurity incident handling is not like regular operational procedures, where one can wait and confirm step by step. In the early stages of an attack, every wrong action can expand the scope of damage. Therefore, enterprises should reconsider how they measure cybersecurity response maturity—not just 'whether there is a response plan,' but more importantly, 'when an incident occurs, can employees immediately do the right thing?'

Management Accountability Should Go Beyond Approving Documents

The 'Cybersecurity Incident Response Action Guidelines' clearly require that cybersecurity governance responsibility lies with management, and response plans must be reviewed and approved by management.

However, true management accountability should not end with a signature on the last page of a plan. Cybersecurity incidents involve multi-faceted risks including operations, finance, legal, IT, HR, and corporate reputation. Management must ensure the organization possesses genuine response capabilities, not just a complete document. They should integrate cybersecurity response capability into governance mechanisms, regularly verifying organizational incident-handling capability through training, scenario drills, and management reviews.

Board members and senior executives should ask: 'If a major cybersecurity incident happens right now, do my colleagues know what the first step is? Can they do it correctly?' This question, though seemingly simple, better reflects a company's true resilience level than confirming 'whether a cybersecurity response plan exists.'

Enterprises Should Move from Regular Self-Audits to Capability Validation

In corporate cybersecurity governance, operational units, as the first line, should fulfill self-control responsibilities through regular self-audits. However, self-audits should not merely confirm policy existence, but verify whether control measures are truly effective. Traditional cybersecurity self-audits often focus on document reviews, such as confirming the existence of response procedures, completion of drill records, and establishment of role divisions.

However, what truly matters is: when an incident occurs, will employees actually follow the procedures? Therefore, regular cybersecurity self-audits by operational units can further introduce 'behavioral validation' thinking—such as conducting unannounced simulation scenarios to observe non-IT personnel's first reactions to suspicious emails, abnormal screens, ransomware messages, or system warnings. The focus should not be just 'is it written in the policy?' but further confirm 'can employees correctly execute according to policy at critical moments?'

Through such test results, enterprises can also establish more management-valuable metrics, such as average initial incident reporting time and error behavior occurrence rate in cybersecurity drills. This elevates cybersecurity governance from document compliance to operational resilience management.

In the corporate cybersecurity governance structure, operational units, as the first line, should fulfill daily control responsibilities through regular self-audits; the second line—cybersecurity, risk, and compliance management units—should continuously monitor control design and implementation; internal audit, as the third line, should evolve from traditional compliance audits to validating control effectiveness and risk governance capability.

Conclusion: True Cybersecurity Resilience is Turning Policies into Habits

The 'Cybersecurity Incident Response Action Guidelines' remind enterprises of an important fact: absolute cybersecurity does not exist; defense boundaries will eventually be breached. What truly determines the extent of damage is often not whether an incident occurs, but whether the organization can respond quickly and correctly after it happens.

The authority repeatedly reminds 'do not shut down,' 'do not delete files,' 'do not conceal incidents'—the real message behind this is that enterprises must reduce secondary damage caused by incorrect first reactions. Therefore, what most enterprises need to improve next is not just the maturity of cybersecurity policies, but the maturity of organizational members' safety behaviors when facing incidents.

When management is willing to personally verify the organization's true response capability, when each unit's cybersecurity self-audit shifts from document compliance checks to validating control effectiveness, and truly focuses on whether employees can make correct responses during incidents, cybersecurity resilience can transform from paper-based policies into the organization's genuine risk governance capability.

*Author is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Business Administration, National Chung Cheng University