GiladMaayan

Published on May 14, 2020 / Updated on November 10, 2020

Skill Level: Any Skill Level

The goal of incident response is to handle the situation in a way that limits damage and reduces disaster recovery time and costs. This article reviews the six most critical stages you need to address in your incident response plan

Incident response is an organized approach for managing cyberattacks or data breaches, including handing the consequences of the attack.. The goal of incident response is to handle the situation in a way that limits damage and reduces disaster recovery time and costs. This article reviews the six most critical stages you need to address in your incident response plan.

Incident response is a procedure that enables companies to detect, prioritize, and prevent cybersecurity incidents. Incident response processes alert organizations about major security incidents, enable them to respond quickly and stop the attack. Quick response reduces damage and prevents further attacks or similar incidents.

Security incidents can escalate into a big problem if you fail to handle them properly. Quick incident response can help organizations reduce data loss, patch vulnerabilities, and reduce the risks of security incidents.

Data protection

Data is an important corporate asset that must be protected. Most organizations apply data protection standards in one way or another.

Hackers can use leaked data or proprietary information to execute ransomware attacks like WannaCry, Petya, and NotPetya. Therefore, an updated incident response plan can help your team proactively protect both personal and professional data.

The incident response plan includes tasks and responsibilities that can protect your data. This includes proper identity and access management to avoid insider threats, secure backups, logs and security alerts to detect malicious activity, and patch management.

Reduce downtime

An incident response plan can significantly reduce downtime. An efficient incident response plan provides a detailed action plan for every cybersecurity situation and guides employees on how to respond to incidents.

An incident response plan should also include instructions that explain how to create daily data backups on an offsite cloud server. These data backups ensure that your data is well-protected and you can quickly access it from another location through an Internet connection.

Preserve public trust

An incident response plan enables companies to maintain public trust in case of an emergency. For instance, a quick recovery from an incident will show the public that your company understands the significance of a proactive business continuity plan.

At the same time, a significant data loss makes it much more difficult to regain trust and damages your company’s reputation. Investing in an incident response plan can ensure that your company can bounce back from any disaster.

Compliance

Regulatory compliance ensures that an organization is following the standards and rules set for its industry. These rules are typically set by government agencies or government legislation. Regulatory compliance is essential for organizations in industries like healthcare and finances. Security incidents in those industries can result in significant fines and costly lawsuits.

Most organizations cannot afford to violate these strict regulations. An incident response plan can help organizations follow rules in a particular industry. An organization needs to also stay up to date on the latest standards and create a detailed plan for a variety of situations to remain compliant.

The incident response team is responsible for executing the incident response plan. In large organizations, the team may include full-time employees. In smaller organizations, the team can consist of employees from other departments who have a part-time responsibility for incident response.

The following list includes the essential roles within the incident response team:

• Security analysts—identify possible incidents by reviewing alerts, and performing an initial investigation to figure out the scope of an attack.
• Threat researchers—provide contextual information about a threat by using threat intelligence feeds, information from the web, and data from different security tools.
• Incident response managers—responsible for approving the incident response plan and managing activity when an incident occurs.
• Other stakeholders—these can include board members and senior management, PR, HR, and senior security personnel like the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).
• Third parties—outsourced security services, as well as lawyers and law enforcement agencies.

Anincident response plan details how an organization should respond to a cyberattack. When creating an incident response plan, there are six stages you need to address.

1. Preparation

Incident response teams have to perform flawlessly in case of a cyberattack, and that takes preparation. A corporate security policy usually includes reasonable use of company data, security violations consequences, and definitions on a security incident. Therefore, organizations need to define a step-by-step guide of how the incident response team should handle incidents, including internal and external communications, and documentation of incidents.

2. Identification

Identification is the detection of malicious activity. This detection can be based on security and monitoring tools, publicly available threat information, or insider information. Part of identification is gathering, and analyzing as much data as possible about the malicious activity.

Incident response teams have to tell apart between simple user mistakes and actual malicious behavior. Organizations cannot tolerate any mistakes in this identification process since any incident can compromise the security of the organization.

3. Containment

There are two forms of containment—short and long. Long-term containment returns all systems to production without the accounts and backdoors that caused the intrusion. Short-term containment prevents the threat from spreading and doing further damage by executing an immediate response. Short-term containment also backs-up all affected systems for later investigation.

4. Incident removal

The incident removal process consists of identifying the point of compromise, evaluating the scope of the attack, and removing any residual back-door access. During this phase, incident response teams remove any remainders of an attack. In addition, they determine the root cause of the incident and eventually understand how it was executed to prevent similar attacks.

5. Recovery

Recovery is the testing of the fixes from the containment phase and the transition to normal operations. During this stage, compromised accounts get new and more secure passwords or replaced with other access methods. In addition, all the vulnerabilities are remediated, functionality is tested and day to day business continues.

6. Lessons learned

Mistakes occur during every incident response. Learning from these mistakes and highlighting what went wrong is an important procedure for improving your ongoing disaster recovery plans. It involves your entire team meeting and providing feedback on what worked, what didn’t and offering recommendations for how to improve the process.

A well-defined incident response plan should include detailed information about each phase of an attack. The six critical phases of incident response are preparation, identification, containment, removal, recovery, and learning from mistakes. In addition, you need to test your plan to ensure your employees are updated about the latest security threats and standards. This can be the difference between a secured and vulnerable organization.