Streamline Your CIRCIA Compliance and Reporting Requirements with RadarFirst

As organizations prepare for the forthcoming Cyber Incident Reporting for Critical Infrastructure Act of 2022 (CIRCIA) rulemaking, many are realizing the scope and tight timelines of its reporting obligations. While the final rule isn’t expected until late 2025, with requirements taking effect in 2026, the clock to get ready is already ticking. Radar Compliance integrates regulatory risk management and reporting to help you transform this challenge into a streamlined, defensible process.

1. Understanding CIRCIA’s Key Obligations

Before diving into tooling, it’s crucial to understand the core requirements outlined in the proposed regulation.

Who’s Covered?

• Any entity larger than a small business (generally 500+ employees or > USD 7.5 million in annual receipts) or any organization of any size operating in one of 16 critical infrastructure sectors (e.g., healthcare, energy, financial services).

What Must Be Reported?

• Substantial cyber incidents (e.g., large-scale data breaches, disruptions to business operations, supply-chain compromises) within 72 hours of a reasonable belief that an incident occurred.
• Ransomware payments made in response to attacks within 24 hours, subject to narrow exemptions.

Why It Matters

• Non-compliance can expose covered entities and responsible individuals to significant penalties, including fines and even prison terms for willfully false statements.

2. Proactive Preparation: Beyond the Clock

To meet these ambitious timelines, organizations should start now:

1. Entity Assessment & Coverage Mapping
   • Confirm whether your organization (or any of its divisions) falls under CIRCIA.
   • Identify third-party service providers or subsidiaries that may need to report on your behalf.
2. Data Inventory & Mapping
   • Catalog all systems and data flows that contain personal or sensitive information.
   • Map data retention points to ensure you can assemble timelines and evidence swiftly.
3. Policy & Playbook Development
   • Develop clear incident response (IR) policies that incorporate 72-hour breach notification and 24-hour ransomware payment protocols.
   • Align IR reporting with other regulatory disclosures (e.g., SEC filings, international breach-notification laws).
4. Cross-Functional Coordination
   • Establish roles and responsibilities across IT, legal, privacy, and executive leadership.
   • Pre-authorize designated reporters (both internal and any external vendors) to submit to CISA on your behalf.

3. Automating CIRCIA Reporting with Radar Compliance

Radar Compliance provides a purpose-built platform for privacy and incident management, created to accelerate and automate every stage of your CIRCIA workflow:

Automated Cyber Risk Assessment with Notification Guidance
Cut your risk-assessment timeline by up to 80%, ensure timely compliance with notification obligations, avoid the risk of over- and under-notification, and establish a fully auditable, consistent process that documents your organization’s required burden of proof under the law.

Critical Reporting Timelines
Automate adherence to both internal escalation deadlines and external regulatory or contractual notification windows. Meet increasingly shorter timelines required by law, contract, or company policy without manual tracking.

Controls Framework
Simplify record-keeping and create streamlined, documentable processes. Provide transparent workstreams to internal and external stakeholders via platform-inherent auditability. Ensure consistency in processes and decision-making, and restrict access to sensitive data to authorized individuals to uphold confidentiality, integrity, and availability.

Operationalized Risk Matrices
Eliminate the subjectivity of manual risk-matrix assessments. Establish a consistent, objective decision-making framework aligned with your unique organizational risk appetite, tying severity levels directly to notification triggers.

Playbooks
Build, customize, and assign workflows for uniform execution across teams. Involve the right stakeholders at each stage, establish an audit-ready framework for scalable growth, and minimize time spent triaging, investigating, and resolving incidents through repeatable, fully documented processes.

Real-time Trend Analysis, Audit Trails, and Reports
Automatically record events over time to facilitate trend analysis and streamlined reporting. Offer internal and external stakeholders a transparent, traceable record via the platform’s audit trail capabilities.

Optimized Stakeholder Communications
Prevent under- and over-notifications to both internal and external parties, thereby reducing enforcement-action risks associated with poor controls. Establish communication frameworks to ensure each stakeholder group receives the right information at the right time.

Collaborative Risk Mitigation
Give multiple departments shared access to records and processes for enhanced company-wide risk mitigation. Leverage automated, signature-based technology to tackle complex event-management challenges with greater speed and accuracy.

4. Best Practices for a Smooth CIRCIA Rollout

Conduct a Gap Analysis: Leverage RadarFirst to benchmark your current IR process against CIRCIA’s proposed rule, identifying missing data points or bottlenecks.

Run Tabletop Exercises: Simulate an incident to practice data collection, internal approvals, and CISA submission — all within the platform.

Integrate with Existing Systems: Connect RadarFirst to your SIEM, ticketing tools, and threat intelligence feeds to automatically populate incident details.

Train Your Teams: Host regular walkthroughs of the reporting workflow, emphasizing the importance of speed and accuracy under CIRCIA.

Review & Refine: After each exercise or live incident, utilize RadarFirst’s audit trail to analyze timing, completeness, and identify areas for improvement in retrospect.

5. Getting Started with CIRCIA Compliance

See firsthand how Radar Compliance simplifies CIRCIA-compliant reporting, from intake to CISA submission. By combining early preparation with RadarFirst’s robust automation, your organization can not only meet CIRCIA’s aggressive reporting timelines but also build a more resilient and transparent incident-response culture. Start now — the clock is already ticking.