Every organization is susceptible to cyberattacks, and when it happens, there’s a tiny line between rescuing your network security and getting it infected by malicious threats. Every second of proactive measure counts to avoid the rapid spread of an attack. As of now, many companies, including enterprises and small-to-midsize firms, are increasingly aware of the need to develop a cybersecurity incident response plan to address attacks headlong. Having an incident response plan that takes effect following a live incident will lower costs and damages to a firm’s reputation. Indeed, there are many things to consider that must all fit in together to execute an incident response seamlessly. Some organizations, especially those that haven’t experienced cyber threats, don’t know where to start from, let alone what to prioritize, which is often why they look to Certified Incident Handlers to assist.
What is the cybersecurity incident response?
A security incident is a warning that there might be a breach of the data on your computer. Sometimes, the warning could also be that the breach in your security has already occurred. A computer security incident can also be regarded as a threat to your computer’s related policies. Examples of computer security threats/incidents include malicious attacks, which include viruses and worms.
How do you respond to a security incident?
The incident response life cycle consists of five vital steps to incident handling. For incidence response to be successful, security teams must take a well-organized approach to any live incident.
What are the five steps of the incident response?
The five steps of incident response are also the framework for any company today to respond to a security incident and are summarized as follows:
Step 1: Preparation
Preparation is vital to effective incident response. Even the best security teams cannot tackle a security breach without pre-determined guidelines. Hence, a healthy plan needs to be available beforehand to take care of any incident that might occur at some point. Preparation is the first step to handle a live incident.
Get the right people with great expertise. Appoint a leader for your IRS team who will be in charge of every activity. The leader should have direct communication with the management team to make crucial decisions with immediate effect.
Step 2: Identification
The focus of this step is to track, monitor, identify, alert, and report any security incident that has occurred.
The incident response team should be able to recognize the source of a security breach and contain it. Your IR team should understand the various incident occurrence indicators such as anti-malware programs, file integrity checking software, system, and network administrators, and more.
Step 3: Triage and Analysis
Much work takes place in this phase. Lots of resources need to be used to get data from tools and systems to analyze further and identify indicators of compromise. In this step, a team should have in-depth skills and knowledge of live incident responses.
Until the incident is cleared, it is difficult to ascertain the extent of the damage. Hence, analyze the cause of the incident; consider the incident as more severe and respond to it quickly.
Step 4: Containment
Containment is one of the most critical steps of incident response. The methods used in this step solely rely on intelligence and indicators of compromise gotten during the triage and analysis step. Containment also has to do with reducing the damages of an incident and quarantining affected systems in a network.
Once the IR team has identified an incident, it needs to be contained. Containing the incident may include disabling the network access to the network so that infected computers are quarantined. You may also need to reset the passwords of affected users.
Step 5: Post-Incident Activity
This step involves the proper documentation of information used to prevent future similar occurrences.
It is necessary to notify affected parties so that they can protect themselves from fallouts from the leak of personal or financial data.
Learn from the incident so that future occurrences won’t occur again. You need to perform post-incident activities such as teaching employees how to avoid phishing scams and adding technologies that can manage and track threats.
These 5 steps are crucial for responding to security incidents within an organization.
The purpose of immediately reporting a suspected cybersecurity incident
When security experts confirm a live incident, it is highly relevant to inform other security bodies in an organization as soon as possible, depending on how severe a security breach is—the quicker the response time, the less damage that might occur. Most notably, departments such as finance, Information Technology, and Customer Service need to act immediately. Additionally, your incident response plan should indicate who needs to be informed immediately. It should also include how to communicate with the appropriate parties to save time after the consequences of a cyber-attack.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment