Incident Handlers: Why Being Certified Matters

Incident Handlers: Why Being Certified Matters

A constant thirst to gain more knowledge and skills is the primary key to consistent career growth. Incident handling is a job that requires continuous evolution. It can be defined as an action plan developed to secure an organization from various security incidents. These incidents may include data breaches, security intrusions, denial of service, or any natural disaster affecting an organization’s security system. So, to keep an organization ready for cyberattacks, incident handling professionals need to update their knowledge and technical skills. The easiest way to develop these skills is to undergo training and attain a credential.

More Info: 312-50: Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH)

Before discussing how certifications can positively transform your career, let us briefly discuss incident management and the five stages of the incident management process.

What Is Incident Management?

Incident management is the process used by the IT operations team for responding to service interruption or other unplanned events to restore the service to its operational state. Incidents can be any event that disrupts the operations within the organization. For instance, downtime on a business application is an incident. A slow-running web server that hinders employee and business productivity is an incident.

Being said that, the incident management processes ensure that such issues and other cybersecurity vulnerabilities are addressed as soon as possible. A faster response from the incident management team can help in reducing the overall impact while mitigating the damages. Moreover, it also ensures that the business services and systems are operating as planned.

Without a proper incident response policy, organizations are at risk of losing valuable data. Moreover, they can also experience downtime and reduced productivity. Therefore, organizations implement a strong incident response policy and are always looking for quality and certified incident handlers.

Five Stages of Incident Management Process

1. Identification, Logging, and Categorization

Using user reports, manual identification, and solution analyses, incidents are identified by the IT team. Once the team identifies the incident, it is then logged and investigated, after which categorization takes place. Being said that, categorization is crucial as it helps in determining how incident security must be handled and how resources should be prioritized for the incident.

2. Incident Notification and Escalation

In this stage of the incident management process, incident alerting takes place. However, the timing of alerts can vary based on how incidents are identified and categorized. On the other hand, escalation is completely based on the categorization of the incident.

3. Investigation and Diagnosis

After the incident has been assigned, cybersecurity experts can start the investigation process and determine the possible solution for the incident. Moreover, after the incident has been diagnosed cybersecurity experts can determine the remediation steps. This can also include notifying all stakeholders.

4. Resolution and Recovery

In this stage of the incident management process, incident handlers eliminate threats and ensure that the systems are restored to full functioning. Being said that, depending on the severity of the incident, organizations might require multiple stages of recovery to ensure the incident does not happen again.

5. Incident Closure

This stage of the incident management process involves documentation and evaluation of the incident response mechanism. The evaluation process helps the incident handler to identify areas for improvement, which can help to prevent future incidents.

How Can Certifications Positively Transform Your Career?

Every credible professional certification comes with some guaranteed benefits, which includes.

Competitive Advantage Over Others

A professional credential in your name sets you apart from your competitors. Any globally recognized credential depicts that you are committed to learning and are passionate about your career. If so, the right credential can uplift your career in many ways.

Better Opportunities with Better Pay

The efforts invested in earning a credential often result in a higher income. Organizations and clients usually try to associate themselves with those professionals who have gone through specialized training.

Advanced Skills to Grow

Updating your existing knowledge base and skillsets helps lay the stepping-stones for your career. It builds your confidence and helps you demonstrate your competence at work. Advancing your skills also helps you stay in competition with upcoming trends.

Build Professional Credibility

Organizations nowadays want to engage with professionals who own a robust and credible background. Credentials depict that you are well-aware of industry standards, which is a positive sign of a professional.

Why Organizations Hire Trained and Certified Incident Handlers?

For an impactful cybersecurity team, incident handlers are considered an integral part. These professionals are usually the first responders (when a security incident occurs). Credential holding incident handlers come with a list of benefits

1. Possess In-depth Knowledge with Hands-on Experience

A certified incident handler has the required knowledge and skills to carry out different phases of incident handling. These professionals go through intense lab practices to develop their skills. Professionals who limit themselves to theoretical knowledge won’t be a reliable choice for an organization. On the other hand, professionals who earned widely accepted credentials come with hands-on experience and can better perform at work.

2. Familiar with Advanced Concepts

The right candidate should be able to keep up with new technologies, strategies, and techniques. It helps keep the organization in an advantageous position. A credential holding incident handler should be aware of advanced concepts, like strategies to handle cloud-based security incidents. From large-scale organizations to SMEs, a major part of the industry is adopting cloud-based solutions. A 2018 IDG Cloud Computing Study shows 73% of organizations are already dependent on cloud services for at least one of their applications.

Other advanced knowledge includes anti-forensic techniques and awareness regarding the latest cyber attacks. Certified incident handlers who know how various anti-forensic techniques (such as encryption, golden ticket, trail obfuscation, and others) and advanced forms of cyber attacks work can help in revamping the existing IR plans.

3. Aware About How to Execute Successful Campaigns

Launching strategized campaigns to contain different security incidents is a critical attribute that every incident handler should have. For instance, every year, phishing attacks are used to victimize users, but in recent years, these attacks have become challenging to identify. Trained professionals know all the tricks and techniques to contain even sophisticated attacks. They are also familiar with hundreds of tools (like SPAMfighter, GoPhish) to contain the incident. This kind of knowledge can only be validated once a professional earns a professional credential.

4. Keep Themselves Updated with Trending and Evolving Knowledge

Certified incident handlers keep updating their knowledge. Awareness regarding the latest cyber-attacks and their associated attack vectors is a must. A certified professional understands the need for basic, advanced, and trending skills. Lacking in one of these areas can lead an organization to huge financial loss.

5. Work as per Standard Regulations

Not all incident handlers know how to create IR plans as per applicable standards. While certified professionals are trained to keep their actions aligned with these regulations, they know the repercussions of their mistakes, which would possibly result in massive fines and penalties, losing customer’s trust, crippling the brand’s reputation, and negative impact on the company’s stock market.

Source: eccouncil.org