CHICAGO (NewsNation Now) — Cyber attacks directed at large corporate organizations have increased over the past few years.

McDonald’s became the latest company to be hit by a data breach after unauthorized activity on its network exposed the personal data of some customers in South Korea and Taiwan.

Pamela Clegg, director of financial investigations and education for CipherTrace, says companies need to create a response plan to prepare for potential hacks.

“Well, all U.S. companies should expect to be a victim at some point, right, so we have to have an incident response plan already on the books,” Clegg said. “They should also engage in incident response firm, and that incident response firm most often will be utilizing a cryptocurrency analytics tool to be able to track that cryptocurrency payment once that payment is actually made.”

Clegg says there’s a lot of information companies can gather within a relatively short amount of time before deciding to go ahead and make that payment and that’s where the incident response teams can come in and help.

While consumers may not be directly affected, Clegg says they are often times still concerned when hackers attack major corporations.

“I think we saw why a lot of us are concerned when Colonial Pipeline suffered their ransomware attack, and then the East Coast was largely left without gas or had a gas shortage for several days,” Clegg said. This is definitely something that affects the overall economy within the United States and the western world. It is certainly something that affects our pocketbooks when we have those large organizations that have to pay out these large ransoms. It definitely is going to get passed down to the consumer as well.”

Watch the full interview in the media player above.