In 2024, a widespread IT outage disrupted more than 8.5 million devices globally, bringing essential services to a standstill, including healthcare providers, government agencies, financial services and critical infrastructure operators. Minimizing operational downtime and business impact became the top priority, requiring organizations to urgently access threat intelligence, implement remediation strategies and execute a coordinated incident response.

The Business Resilience Council (BRC), a non-profit, all-sector collective defence community, quickly activated its resilience framework to facilitate a multiorganization response. With more than 2,000 engaged organizations, the BRC leveraged its network to rapidly analyse, collaborate and implement mitigation efforts:

• By 03.00 Eastern time (ET), cross-sector analysts in the BRC chat had identified the root cause of the issue.
• By 09.00 ET, rough solutions had been formulated.
• By 13.00 ET, more than 150 global organizations had joined a BRC-hosted call to refine mitigation strategies and share intelligence.
• Within two business days, BRC had hosted a joint ISAC briefing with more than 1,500 participants, providing exclusive, legally protected insights before public disclosures.

This coordinated, intelligence-driven response enabled organizations to reduce downtime by: accelerating root-cause analysis and remediation; minimizing uncertainty by sharing real-time, actionable intelligence; enhancing cross-sector collaboration, thus reinforcing collective cyber resilience; and strengthening future mitigation strategies, integrating lessons learned.

By fostering pre-established relationships and engaging vendors, suppliers and security teams ahead of incidents, the BRC demonstrated how collective defence can mitigate widespread cyber disruptions. The incident serves as a model for how rapid, coordinated response efforts can enhance organizational and national cyber resilience.