| Hi, it’s Jordan. A panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos discusses the aftermath of a hack of a $54 billion company. But first… Must Reads: • Trump backs Musk or Ellison buying TikTok with US stake
• HPE investigating breach claims but says there’s no business impact
• FTC study finds consumer data is behind ‘surveillance’ pricing When Johnson Controls International Plc suffered a devastating ransomware attack in 2023, one lesson for Chief Executive Officer George Oliver was that management needs to be as transparent as possible in the wake of a breach with not only customers but also employees. Oliver, whose company makes fire, heating and cooling and security systems, said he wanted to keep his employees informed during a confusing and distressing situation. “We have 100,000 colleagues across the globe. Making sure they’re all aligned was a test of our culture, a test of our ability to respond,” Oliver said Tuesday during a panel on cybersecurity at the annual conference in Davos, Switzerland. Over the last several months, I’ve occasionally written about how executives react to breaches. As the scourge of ransomware affects organizations globally, experiences like Oliver’s can help inform other leaders how to respond if they receive the dreaded notification that their computer networks have been locked up by hackers. The price tag for the Johnson Controls incident was about $29 million, which mostly went to responding to and remediating the breach, the company said in a regulatory filing last year. Oliver said managers need to understand the infrastructure of their network and how it’s secured before a breach occurs. No matter how much planning a company does, there’s still a lot of real-time learning during an incident, he added. “What you want to do is instill confidence,” he said. “Everyone’s going to have an event, so how do you manage that? How do you respond? Our team was prepared, we reacted, we continued to run the company fairly well while we mitigated the risk.” Oliver was joined on stage by George Kurtz, the founder and CEO of CrowdStrike Holdings Inc., which experienced a crisis of its own last year when a faulty software update from the cybersecurity software company triggered a global IT meltdown. Kurtz said his efforts to convey information about the incident as the company learned it, across TV, social media and the internet, helped repair some trust that was lost as a result of the outage. “If you are upfront, if you’re transparent, if you communicate not only one time but frequently, this was a big part of our response,” Kurtz said. “We did the best we could with what we had in front of us.” Kurtz apologized on the Today Show within hours of his company’s outage, which disrupted business operations and air travel globally. Some public relations experts faulted Kurtz for not saying he was sorry during his first communication on the matter, where he explained the outage wasn’t the result of a cyberattack. CrowdStrike is facing lawsuits over the update glitch from shareholders and also Delta Airlines Inc., whose operations were significantly impacted by it. | 
