Incident response management is a systematic technique for cybersecurity events and security breaches. Incident response aims to identify genuine security problems, control the situation, limit the damage inflicted by an attacker, and decrease recovery time and costs.
Incident Response
The attempt to swiftly identify an assault, mitigate its consequences, contain damage, and fix the source to lessen the risk of future occurrences is known as an incident response (IR).
Every organisation should have a cyber incident response strategy in place to provide an effective response and quick recovery if security controls fail to prevent an incident from occurring. This strategy should be evaluated and revised on a regular basis.
Incident Response Plan
A cyber incident response plan should be aligned with the organization’s incident, emergency, crisis, and business continuity plans, as well as jurisdictional and national cyber and emergency plans, in order to be effective. It should assist workers in carrying out their tasks by explaining all legal obligations and requirements of the regulation in Melbourne, Queensland, and other parts of Australia.
When a security breach or cyber-attack occurs, an effective incident response plan can help minimise the impact of the incident and enable a quick recovery.
The incident response plan should outline how your team should complete the following incident response steps, as well as who is responsible for what and what paperwork and notification system are required.
- Respond to potential threats.
- Categorise Incidents to assess their seriousness.
- Minimize a threat to avoid additional harm.
- Eliminate the threat by addressing the underlying cause.
- Rebuilding manufacturing systems
- Action items and post-mortems to prevent future assaults.
1) Prepare
This is the first stage of the process and involves the creation of a robust Incident response plan by the team. Playbooks, reference guides, blogs on the official web page, and templates are also created. This stage also involves training the team. A test or exercise is prepared to evaluate the incident.
2) Detect, Investigate, and Activate:
This includes confirming the incident, its classification, SEMT/CIRT activation, and questions for investigation.
3) Contain, Collect Evidence, and Remediate
This stage involves documenting all the activities performed during the incident response plan like the actions performed, decisions made, and records stored.
4) Recovery and Report:
This stage involves the preparation of the Recovery Plan. Stand down SEMT or CIRT document and the Internal Incident Report. Ensure to save the documents in both Word and PDF format and keep a handy physical printout.
5) Learn and Improve:
In this stage, the Incident Response Management team has reviewed the cybersecurity incident and records its findings. Playbooks, CIRP, and templates are updated based on the findings. The result is documented for future reference. This stage involves learning from the incident and framing policies and procedures to improve systems and prevent re-occurrence.
Incident Response Team
The following jobs are commonly seen on incident response teams. In the case of a security issue, each position should be explicitly informed of their responsibilities:
- Security analysts.
- Incident response managers.
- Threat researchers.
- IT and security engineers.
- Legal and risk management.
- Human resources management.
- Corporate communications.
- External security forensics experts.
Incident Response Tools
Modern security companies employ technology tools to identify and even respond to security problems to be effective.
If the following security tools are present in the organization’s environment, incident response teams can use them:
1) Security Information and Event Management (SIEM):
SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) gathers data and logs from applications, infrastructure, network security tools, firewalls, and other sources. It analyses data from many sources and provides alerts to notify security professionals of harmful activities, allowing for further investigation.
2) Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR):
Endpoint detection and response (EDR) agents are frequently installed on laptops, workstations, servers, and cloud endpoints. These devices can identify threats, company information and personal data affected by the attack, enable real-time breach investigation, and undertake automatic remediation, like isolating a device from a network or erasing and re-imaging it. They test all accessibility points in the system.
3) Network Traffic Analysis (NTA)
Network Traffic Analysis NTA gathers, analyses, and assesses network data and communication patterns in search of suspected hostile activity. Detects and responds to security issues that occur throughout the core network, operational networks, and cloud networks.
Anitech’s Guide on Best Practices for Incident Response Management
Here are some tips from Anitech to help you increase the efficacy of your organization’s incident response management program:
1) Manage Incidents Throughout their Lifecycle
The NIST framework defines the cybersecurity lifecycle as having five stages: identification, protection, detection, response, and recovery. A comprehensive incident response management program must coordinate and automate the whole process, from event detection through communication, damage control, and lessons learned after the crisis is contained.
2) Clear, Comprehensive Operating Procedures
While the company is under attack, robust incident response management allows security professionals to remain cool and take the appropriate actions. A key advantage of a structured incident response management approach is that what has to be done in the early stages of a crisis is readily obvious. Incident response protocols define who is accountable for coordinating all resources to reduce the threat in the most effective way feasible.
The strategy should contain defined risk management and communication methods in addition to technical people. It should be obvious who may speak on the organization’s behalf and what they should say. Procedures for alerting attorneys, insurance companies, and other relevant internal or external parties should be established.
3) Automate Communication and Escalation
When there is a security breach, the organization’s reputation might suffer greatly. It is critical to train personnel on how to communicate during a crisis. Teams can use automated communication systems to focus on fixing high-priority problems rather than squandering critical time during a crisis.
4) Post-mortem Documentation and KPIs Monitoring
When a security event has finished, post-mortem analysis and documentation is a vital aspects of efficient incident response management. It enables staff to transform a disaster into a learning opportunity for the entire firm. The project is, therefore, a good source of industrial education for all employees to develop or enhance their skill sets. They can add this experience to their portfolio.
Besides, the incident response team should conduct frequent analyses of incident response operations and collect statistics such as the number of incidents per month, mean time to detection (MTTD), mean time to resolution (MTTR), and downtime rates for impacted systems. Tracking these and other pertinent data over time can help measure the efficacy of the incident response procedure. This will help them to prevent any uncalled cyberattacks. Thus, their services will make them stand out in the industry and can get them positive customer feedback.
Anitech’s experienced ISMS consultants can guide you further on incident response management.
Feel free to contact us at 1300 802 163 or email at info@anitechgroup.com
Our team will be happy to help!
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