Like many, West thinks it’s the first day following a breach that is going to be the most important for a company, setting the tone for the coverage of the incident.

“The first 24 hours are crucial,” West says. “A crisis involves downsides, but how quickly and how well the management team responds determines the level of reputational damage.”

West points to both TalkTalk and eBay – both of which took days to release a statement and notify their customers following a data breach – as examples of companies that misstepped here.

TalkTalk boss Dido Harding ran into difficulties when she went on TV and said she didn’t know how many customers were affected, escalating a relatively minor breach into a huge hack due to her uncertainty.

Even worse, says West, US retailer Target’s customers first found out that their data was compromised through the digital security blog Krebs on Security, and not from the company itself.

Target reportedly knew about the data breaches for 12 days before taking action and its profits fell nearly 50% in its fourth fiscal quarter following the data breach, which is arguably one of the worst commercial corporate data breaches in history.

In this digital age, cyber breaches are no longer an ‘if’ but a ‘when’ and the digital landscape is become increasingly hostile, with the recent WannaCry incident affecting more than 220,000 computers in 150 countries and costing companies an estimated $8bn globally.

Meanwhile, the Internet of Things will continue to grow exponentially as the amount of connected devices, network traffic and smartphone connections increase, further adding to the risk.

Over the last few years, the way news spreads and grows has changed. A lot of this is due to social media, which has come to define much of the way events are covered in the wider reporting press.

During the Asiana Airlines crash landing in 2013, for example, the first story came out on Twitter just 30 seconds after the crash, via a user at the scene.

“Years ago, communication professionals talked about the golden hour for responding to a crisis when the traditional news cycle held sway,” says West. “Social media has truncated this to the golden second: the news cycle is now instant and runs 24/7.

If a company tries to control and limit this flow of information they will fail – and those attempts to control could even add to problems.

“Crises are now measured in tweets per second and companies have to communicate at the speed of their audience,” West says. “Therefore, shorten the chain of command: shorten the review and approval process. During a crisis, the traditional command and control business unit structure will only doom organizations from the start.”