Mark Lynd
Incident response is an important part of protecting an organization from security incidents. It involves identifying, assessing, and mitigating the impact of a security incident. Cybersecurity incidents can cause significant damage to the organization's operations, reputation, and finances. But, by ensuring an incident response plan is in place will help reduce the impact of the incident and minimize financial and reputational losses. It can also help the organization quickly return to normal operations and meet compliance requirements.
The Benefits of Incident Response are Strong
One of the main benefits of incident response is that it helps organizations reduce the negative effects of security incidents. Having a plan in place and teams ready to respond quickly can reduce the financial and reputational damage of an incident.
Another advantage of incident response is that it helps speed up the return to normal operations. By having a strategy and trained response teams, businesses can quickly recover from an incident and return to normal. This helps reduce the impact on customers and other stakeholders, and minimizes disruption.
Incident response can also help companies meet compliance requirements and maintain their reputation. By having a response plan in place, companies can show that they are protecting sensitive information and following the rules. This helps them protect their reputation, maintain the trust of customers, and keep their good name.
The following incident response steps are a real-world variation of the common steps used by the SANS Institute and others:
Stage 1 - Preparation
Being properly prepared for a cybersecurity incident means having a clear plan for how to handle the incident and making sure that all stakeholders, such as IT, legal, and executive management, know their roles and responsibilities prior to the incident. This also means you need to set up clear lines of communication and determine who has the power to make decisions in case of an incident.
Having a clear plan for how to handle security incidents can help an organization handle them better. The incident response plan should be reviewed and updated often to make sure it stays relevant and effective. This includes making a list of possible incident scenarios, figuring out the right response for each scenario, and giving different teams and people specific roles and responsibilities.
It is also important to test and do drills on a regular basis to test the incident response plan and determine gaps, then revise accordingly. These drills can help make sure that everyone knows their roles and responsibilities and instill confidence in leadership and the incident response team that their incident response planning is effective in finding, responsive and minimizes and the effects of a security incident.
Stage 2 - Identification
Since time is of the essence and the longer an incident goes undiscovered, the more damage it is likely to inflict, having good visibility is essential for proper incident identification. In order to promptly find and identify security incidents, it is crucial to have monitoring and detection capabilities. Systems for detecting intrusions, security information and event management (SIEM) programs, and other security instruments are frequently included in these capabilities.
During the identification process it is crucial to collect as much data and information about the incident as possible to properly determine an incident’s severity and help specify the right course of action, This includes determining which applications, systems, and data are affected, as well as any potential effects it may have on the company brand and operations.
Documenting all incident-related information, including the incident's time and date, the systems and data affected, as well as any other pertinent information, is crucial at this point. This information is essential to figuring out what caused it.
Stage 3 - Containment
The containment stage is critical to preventing the incident from spreading and causing further damage. Properly containing the incident can entail powering down impacted systems, disconnecting them from the network, or other steps to further isolate the event. The objective of the containment stage is to lessen the impacts of the incident while maintaining the evidence for further investigation in the future.
Containment is a crucial step in incident response because it can stop an incident from spreading to other systems and doing further harm. It is also important, so your team can implement measures to prevent the incident from recurring in the future, such as blocking IP addresses, locking down accounts or disabling devices that were used in the attack. These measures can help prevent the attacker from continuing to exploit any of these vulnerabilities and causing further damage.
Step 4: Eradication
After the incident has been contained, the emphasis switches to eliminating the incident's cause. This could entail uninstalling malware or other harmful code, fixing security flaws, or taking other measures to get rid of the threat.
Eradication involves removing the incident's root cause and restoring the afflicted systems to a known-good state. This may entail uninstalling malware, decrypting data, fixing security flaws, or taking other measures to get rid of the threat.
It's crucial to completely clean the impacted systems and make sure there is no malware or other malicious programs on them. To make sure that all malware has been eliminated, it may be required to re-image the afflicted systems or running them a thorough scan.
Implementing efforts to stop similar occurrences from happening again is also crucial. This may entail putting in place additional security controls like intrusion detection systems, more security training or use a more advanced security framework like Zero Trust.
Step 5: Recovery
After the incident has been contained and eradicated, the focus shifts to recovery. This may entail repairing damaged systems and data and resuming regular business operations. Prioritizing the restoration of critical systems and data is crucial, as is coordinating with other stakeholders like executive management, legal, and IT to prioritize recovery.
Before notifying leadership and communicating the resumption of normal business operations to the rest of the business, it's crucial to verify that all systems and data have been properly recovered and that all appropriate security controls have been put in place. This may entail conducting various recovery procedures, re-imaging impacted systems, or restoring via backups. The recovery process can be one of the longer stages time wise during incident response.
Step 6: Post-Incident Review
The final step in incident response is conducting a post-incident review. This can entail reviewing the incident response plan and procedures, determining where gaps exist, identifying where improvements can be made, updating the incident response plan, and communicating the modifications with stakeholders and leadership.
To make sure that revised incident response plan and procedures are compliant and that any necessary reporting requirements for cyber insurance and the authorities are satisfied, it is also crucial to review and evaluate any pertinent laws, regulations, or industry standards. This may entail going over incident response guidelines and policies as well as any legal or regulatory obligations for notice and reporting of incidents.
Tested Incident Response is Critical to Rapid Recovery
A crucial component of cybersecurity is incident response, which can assist organizations in reducing the effects of security incidents and swiftly getting back to normal business activities.
Organizations need to ensure that leadership and all stakeholders are aware of their roles and responsibilities and confirm a revised, tested and actionable incident response plan is in place.
Regular incident response drills, training, proper resources for the incident response team, effective communication, ongoing monitoring, and threat intelligence are all crucial elements of incident response and readiness.
Organizations can be better equipped to respond to security incidents, stop them from inflicting substantial damage, and resume normal operations more quickly by following these procedures and routinely evaluating and updating incident response plans.