Programmable Money: Opportunities & Benefits of Digital Currency

Programmable money technology is regarded by many as the most valuable sector of the cryptocurrency market. Furthermore, programmable money helps to deliver banks, currencies, and financial instruments with new utility, and its potential value is in the trillions of dollars. Although many people are interested in programmable money, fewer people know what it means.

More Info: EC-Council Certified Security Analyst (ECSA v10)

This post will explore the concept of programmable money by explaining if this is possible using smart contracts on blockchains.

Is Programmable Money Automated Payments

You may be wondering if it is programmable money if you click on make a payment on your bank’s online banking website and the bank’s computers help move the money. Contrary to popular belief, it is not programmable money because you instruct your bank to make a payment.

Programmable money technology is not only about the ability to write arbitrary code for moving money. Furthermore, it is not programmable money if it includes complex business logic and external data as the decision-making process. Nowadays, many businesses send payment instructions to banks using the computer programs running on the corporate servers.

You may be wondering if programmable money then has to do with automation of payments at the bank’s side instead of the customer’s side. Most banks are already performing client-instructed automated tasks with rudimentary. Banks can even allow you to upload code, run the code, and then use the code result as a payment instruction from you. However, this can create liability for the banks when the code goes wrong.

If Programmable Money Is Not Automated Payments, Then What?

In the above scenarios, a bank can hold back payment even when they got a payment instruction. Regulators also require them not to tell customers why they even withheld the payment. In such cases, you are not assured that the payment is going to work in the end.

Opposite to the traditional payment methods, programmable money means that no intermediary or bank can stop the code’s instructions and it will be carried out once executed. As a customer, you’ll find the freedom to hold and control money outside the banking system.

A transaction like this can then be achieved using stable coins on public or permissioned ledger. This way, you can upload programs known as smart contracts that will indeed run. However, smart contracts will lead to creating instruction to the smart contract that defines the money. The smart contract that defines money may also decide not to make payment, for instance, when the payment instruction is made to a blacklisted account.

Programmable Money Is A Designer Money

The best way to describe programmable money is that it is designer money. It is money created by someone (an issuer) that will work in a certain way and has a specific constraint no matter the owner of the funds at any point in time.

Bank cannot do this because money in banks is usually different. For instance, money kept in JP Morgan is quite different from that at Citibank. JP Morgan’s scenario means there is a legal agreement that JP Morgan owes you money, while Citibank’s case means Citibank owes you some dollars.

Before the money in each bank can behave a certain way, both banks will need to use the same logic and constraints. This task is costly and complex because there is no ledger for more references while any transactions are made.

Problems Faced By Banks

◉ The loans can be used for other items than what a borrower told their lender they would use the money for.

◉ The funds meant for a specific purpose end up somewhere else.

◉ Grants are used for paying for things not intended for.

Benefits Of Designer Money

Designer money helps to create money where the money has control logic built into it. Designer money can be created using a Smart Contract level. The Smart Contract helps to define:

◉ The characteristics of the money like how many units there are, etc.

◉ How the users can interact with the capital, such as making a payment, asking for balance, etc.

The designer can then code the constraints in the second part of the smart contract. This way, all the payment requests come with conditions no matter who is controlling the money. The benefit is that the money only goes to the intended destinations.

After the special purpose money has gotten to the destination, it can then be redeemed for general-purpose cash when needed. Developers can also create certain types of money that you can only send with additional data; for instance, the proof of payment supports an import or export. You can also put a constraint on the money flows or wallet balances.

Furthermore, designer money offers endless possibilities. The whole point of special-purpose funds is to reduce fungibility.

Source: eccouncil.org

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How Artificial Intelligence Is Favorable to Modernize the Methods Used for Vulnerability Assessments

Artificial Intelligence has now been incorporated in various fields with vast development and implementation, which have been proven to be of great benefit. Artificial Intelligence, also known as AI, is the stimulation of human intelligence in machines. They are programmed meticulously to think like human beings and replicate their activities. The main objective of an AI simulated machine is to achieve and perform all the activities done by a human being. Unlike human beings, AI machines are not forgetful as they are built with colossal storage to record all the required data. They never get tired, run on processers, and finish a specific task much faster than a human being. With the benefits it comes with, AI has now gained popularity and has been accepted into various sectors like the food industry as waiters and chefs, organizations to calculate and work on special projects, healthcare organizations to analyze and programmed to treat patients as well as perform operations and especially in the cybersecurity sector in training data modules to learn how to react to various situations and detecting anomalies/threats and risk based on patterns generated, vulnerability assessments, etc.

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

AI has been proven to be beneficial in cybersecurity and has many advantages when detecting vulnerabilities and managing them. AI techniques and machine learning can be a great combination to resolve cyber-related threats, risks, and attacks, especially in vulnerability management to prevent attacks beforehand.

Defining AI and Vulnerability Assessment

AI is a blanket term consisting of numerous advanced computer science areas ranging from voice detection to typical language processing, robotics, and deep representational learning. Scientists and researchers aim to automate intelligent behavior in machines that are capable of doing human tasks. AI scientists and technologists are continuously seeking various methodologies to automate “intelligent” behavior. A single AI component used expansively in several applications is machine learning — the algorithms that support historical data/information to forecast or make decisions about a particular action. More extensive the historical data, the machine learning’s decision-making capabilities improve and make better and accurate predictions about situations or circumstances and are termed as getting smarter. It advances with time and without human interference.

Vulnerability assessment is defined as the systematic review of security weaknesses in a system or network. It assesses if the system is prone to any known vulnerabilities. If yes, it assigns severity levels to those vulnerabilities and suggests mitigation methods. The scanning process to identify vulnerabilities and resolve them are categorized into the following steps:

◉ Vulnerability Identification

◉ Analysis

◉ Risk Assessments

◉ Remediation

Development of a Significant Vulnerability Risk Score

The vulnerability score is significantly similar to the risk score attached to the vulnerabilitiesin the Critical Vulnerabilities and Exposures [CVE] program. The CVE comprises a list of records/data which contains a unique identification number. The unique identification number is used to identify, define, and catalog the vulnerabilities, which are publicly disclosed. It can also be incorporated into the products and services as per the terms of use. Though CVE is useful in determining the vulnerability and its possible risk severity, it lacks context, making it difficult to rationalize certain aspects. A vulnerability may be assigned a high-risk score but, on the specific network, the affected place may be secluded on a secured subnet, or not connected to the internet, or maybe on a device or program which has no operations or services, resulting in little or no risk to the organization. The CVE is excellent to kickstart for context-based risk analysis. Once the asset/device context is attained, it is combined with the knowledge and external threat environment, generating the context-driven priority that is accurate. This can be used to determine the vulnerability severity or the importance of the vulnerability risk/threats.

Vulnerability Exploitation: The Latest Trends

Various brand marketers use AI-based analyses to assess the posts of their products or services on different social media platforms.  The result enables the brand marketing employees to understand how the public perceives their products and how it changes and how it has changed over a period of time. This is achieved by AI application, and the data is collected over time and compared to decide what is lacking and what should be improved. Similarly, cybersecurity chat boards and other online sources of cybersecurity information and interaction can be collected and analyzed. This analysis is done by AI technology, which can identify the vulnerability that is exploited chiefly based on the data collected. The technology used to analyze the data collected from multiple interactions, polls, and other information is the Neural Networks and Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques. The NLP technique can recognize the exact meaning, positive and negative traits, accurate technical information from the transcript. AI is responsible for interpreting vast amounts of data and merging their meanings to gain context for the risks of the given vulnerabilities.

Asset Detection

It is relatively important to detect all the assets/devices for an effective vulnerability assessment, especially those atypical/uncategorized in a given context. Conventional methods are not efficient to detect uncategorized information/data/assets, such as a Linux server in windows machine with database services.  These types of conditions require at-most priority from security teams. Pattern recognition, AI techniques are implemented to identify and distinguish uncategorized/unique assets. Novelty, Anomaly Detection, or outlier detection methods/algorithms are enforced to identify uncategorized assets. The most known effective algorithm is the Isolation Forest, where numerous multidimensional representations are used to compare the characteristics of the assets/devices. The uncategorized assets are detected and flagged for identification purposes.

Election Reliability Assessment

It is crucial to determine whether a vulnerability is exploitable or not as the process of vulnerability detection involves a high range of false positives. AI methods and techniques can be implemented in detecting the vulnerabilities, which significantly reduces the number of false-positive outcomes by detecting the misdetections. Various services like services running and others, and the vulnerability which was flagged as a result of the detection method, are used to confirm the legitimacy of the identified vulnerability. With experience, the ability of AI machines can accurately detect false positives from legit vulnerabilities.

Bayesian Networks are used to improve the reliability of vulnerability detection, to determine if the vulnerability is legit or not. The technique includes other observations as pieces of evidence in the assessment procedure. Bayesian networks are far more efficient and effective and, when implied, promote intelligence analysis which results in balancing the defective scanning techniques with the help of proficient human knowledge.

Leveraging Industry Vulnerability Remediation Priority Data

Every contemporary vulnerability assessment product has cloud-based components in them, and some are completely cloud-based. Cloud-based vulnerability assessment/management platforms are extremely beneficial. One of the most important benefits is the anonymization of user data which can be reduced and discarded from the applications. Every single organization is regularly remediating vulnerabilities daily. Several remediation procedures over several customers are performed, and cloud-based vulnerability assessment products have a rich data source on which AI engine can be used. The source undergoes constant changes due to various factors and collects data. This can either strengthen or contradict the conventional remediation methods of vulnerability prioritization. AI can be applied to actual vulnerability remediation data, resulting in yielding insights based on various sources’ shared judgments. Gradient Boosted Tree Regression is a machine learning technique that, when combined with user behavioral patterns and preferences, results in predicting what is essential, which helps understand and remediate vulnerabilities.

Gradient Boosted Tree Regression

Remediation Plan Recommendations

A list of vulnerabilities is entrenched based on a context that is achieved using AI techniques. Enhancing and focused on delivering solutions is the last step in the vulnerability assessment procedure. AI has a major role in achieving the necessary solutions based on vast programs and algorithms used to differentiate anomalies, threats, risks, etc. AI techniques speed up the detection process and provide a solution in a lesser period, maximizing the risk reduction while still minimizing remediation activity. Risk-Aware Recommender System is a hybrid between collaborative filtering and content-based systems, resulting in multiple remediation situations. The vulnerability management Recommender System considers the risk degradation that the remediation situations can afford with the help of the AI-generated risk scores.

Many progressions have been made in the field of cybersecurity with the help of various AI techniques. There is lesser human interference with AI machines and techniques, resulting in greater accuracy of the results, and it is a fast process. With the increase in the complexity range and other risk factors, it can help take off the load from the conventional vulnerability management team and efficiently store data and detect situations detected long ago.

AI can be very useful in the field of cybersecurity. It is fast and can predict and identify potential threats, risks, and vulnerabilities present in the system. It is also responsible for mitigating the risk factors and obtaining a feasible solution. Though AI provides solutions, the security team needs to practice privacy enhancement methods, which is crucial in developing and implementing security habits that can help individuals take preventive measures beforehand in all aspects. One can learn how to imply the AI techniques and methodologies in the cybersecurity field by pursuing ethical hacking essential to understand the vulnerability assessment procedures and vulnerability assessment tools required to mitigate potentially exploitable vulnerabilities. One such top ethical hacking certification course is the EC-Council’s Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) Certification which provides in-depth knowledge about the role of a hacker and other components which is essential to maintain the security of the cyber environment and provides ethical hacking training that is, practical – hands-on problems to train the individual to deal with real-world problems.

Certified Ethical Hacker is one such course that enables an individual to learn about the role of AI and how it is implemented in cybersecurity to reduce and mitigate risks, vulnerabilities, and other factors.

Source: eccouncil.org

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Why Every Organization Must Have a Successful Incident Response Plan?

Organizations across industry verticals are starting to realize the importance of incident response plans to attract and retain customers. However, with more technological integrations, the organization exposes itself to new and emerging cybersecurity threats. As a result, it becomes crucial for organizations of all sizes to develop and establish an incident response plan that can help deal with major and minor security threats.

Read More: EC-Council Certified Security Specialist (ECSS)

In this article, we will discuss the incident response plan, who should use the incident response plan, and why every organization must have a successful incident response plan in place.

What Is An Incident Response Plan?

Think of an incident response plan as an organized approach that helps the organization address and manage the aftermath of a data breach. However, the key to a successful response is a systematic, orderly, and well-thought-out incident response plan.

Whenever a security breach occurs, the organization can directly go into damage control, and panic can creep in suddenly. This is the same situation that the incident response plan tries to combat. The written document provides everyone within the security team with step-by-step instructions on how to contact during the data breach and how to proceed ahead for minimizing damages.

Who Should Make Use of Incident Response Plan?

An incident response plan used to be an optional safeguard measure implemented by few organizations in the past. However, with the new cybersecurity compliance standards emerging for different industries, an incident response plan has quickly become necessary for a well-rounded security plan.

The PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) requires that the compliant entity develop an incident response plan, have a designated incident response team, test the incident response plan annually, and train employees on how to follow the plan for optimal results. Moreover, the Healthcare Portability and Accountability Act also needs compliance to have an incident response plan.

Even if no standards require your organization to have an incident response plan, it is still worth developing and implementing one. Therefore, every industry, from education to a financial one, must create an incident response plan.

Reasons Why Every Organization Must Have a Successful Incident Response Plan

1. Protecting confidential information and sensitive data

One of the major reasons why every organization must have a successful incident response plan is to protect its confidential and sensitive information. Data in the wrong hands can be held for monetary gains or leaked to the public if it is proprietary information. The incident response process helps the organization protect its digital assets by leveraging logs, securing backups, proper identity and access management, and strong attention to patch management.

2. Protecting business reputation

According to PwC, 87% of the customers will take their business elsewhere if the organization cannot handle their data responsibly. Therefore, if a security breach happens and the organization cannot handle the breach responsibly, the reputation is at stake. Having an incident response plan provides the business with a clear framework to deal with security breaches and thus allows to gain customer trust.

3. Protecting business revenue

With security incidents, business revenue is also at stake. Cyber-attacks can result in the loss of billions of dollars. However, when you have an incident response plan in place, it allows the organization to take action and contain the cyber threat immediately. Therefore, allowing the business to minimize damages, reduce downtime, and avoid losing more customers. However, if the organization does not have an incident response mechanism in place, it can result in catastrophic losses for the business.

Source: eccouncil.org

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What is SIEM? Why is SIEM important than ever before?

For organizations, data security has become come crucial than ever before. With each passing day, IT environments within the organization are growing even more complex, distributed, and difficult to manage. As a result, the use of SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) technology has become more important in today’s digital-first era.

More Info: 312-96: EC-Council Certified Application Security Engineer (CASE) - Java

In this article, we will discuss SIEM, the working of SIEM, and the reasons why SIEM is more important than ever before.

What Is SIEM?

SIEM or Security Information and Event Management tool is a software program that helps in aggregating and analyzing various activities from multiple sources across the organization’s IT infrastructure.

SIEM collects data from servers, network devices, domain controllers, and more. Security Information and Event Management stores, aggregates, normalizes, and applies analytics to the collected data for discovering trends and detecting threats to the organization. This enables the security team within the organization to investigate alerts for a potential data security breach.

How Does SIEM Work?

SIEM tool works by collecting event and log data generated through the organization’s security devices, applications, and host systems. All of this data is brought together into a single centralized platform. Moreover, SIEM gathers data from firewall logs, antivirus events, and other locations and then sorts the data into different categories.

SIEM serves two primary capabilities to the incident response team. First, reporting and forensics about security incidents, and second, offers alerts by analyzing data which matches certain rule set. For the security team, the SIEM provides the needed analysis at their fingertips so that the SOC team can evaluate data breaches with as much information as possible.

3 Reasons Why SIEM Is Important Than Ever Before

1. Operations Support

Along with the size of IT teams, the size and the complexity of today’s IT environment are growing exponentially. Operations within the organization are often divided into several groups: Security Operations Center, Network Operations Center, Desktop Team, Server Team, and many more, wherein all of these different teams have their own tools for monitoring and responding to events.

It is because of this reason, collaboration and information sharing become difficult within the distributed team environment. However, for efficient, cross-team collaboration, SIEM can help in pulling data from various systems into a single place.

2. Compliance

Certain regulations bind businesses. These regulations include HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and Sarbanes-Oxley. However, complying with these regulations can become a daunting task for organizations.

SIEM tools can help organizations comply with different regulations’ requirements directly and indirectly. For instance, almost all kinds of regulations require companies to have some log management. Therefore, SIEM provides a seamless way to deploy the log collection requirement easily and provides instant access to log data. Moreover, SIEM also offers audit support to ensure that certain requirements are met.

3. Threat Detection

One of the primary roles of SIEM tools is to help detect and prevent threats before they cause irreparable damage to the organization.

However, do not confuse yourself. SIEM helps in detecting the activity associated with the attack rather than the attack itself. For instance, a phishing attack using the zero-day exploit has a high likelihood of making it through the antivirus, spam filters, and firewalls and being opened by a target user. Security teams can configure the SIEM for detecting activity surrounding such an attack.

Source: eccouncil.org

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Who Is Responsible For Successful Incident Management?

Let’s admit it – a customer does not care who is responsible for solving the issue when an incident occurs within the organization. They only care about functional systems. Therefore, the organization’s responsibility is to deploy incident management processes and get the servers up and running immediately. As not all organizations are structured in the same way, there is no one-size-fits-all incident management process. Therefore, organizations must figure out who owns which parts of the process themselves. It will help the organization in improving overall collaboration and service reliability.

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

This article will discuss who is responsible for incident management and the incident management process in more detail.

Who Is Responsible For Incident Management?

Everyone involved with the organization is responsible for incident management. As a member of the organization, it is the responsibility of everyone to ensure that you maintain and adhere to stringent security measures implemented by the organization.

When a security incident occurs within the organization, it is the responsibility of security and IT teams to ensure that there is minimal downtime. With the help of a strong incident response plan, the SOC team has to ensure that they can detect and contain the security incident as soon as possible.

Incident Management Process

1. Incident Detection

From the organizational point of view, it is crucial to identify the incident even before it occurs. Therefore, incident detection is the first step in your incident management process. Continuous monitoring of the systems and the networks will help the security team in alerting the security analysts. Moreover, ensure that the team is equipped with the correct tools and techniques to identify the security incidents faster and efficiently. Thus, ensuring that the SOC team can take action more quickly.

2. Incident Response

After the security incident has been identified, the SOC team needs to react and respond quickly to contain the incident and minimize the damages. For achieving this, the organization needs a strong incident response plan that clearly defines different teams’ roles and responsibilities to contain and overcome the security incident. Everyone within the organization must know how to contact for what purpose and notify all the stakeholders affected by the security incident.

3. Incident Remediation

If the security team has the right information and processes for incident response, incident remediation becomes quicker. It is very easy for the team to get lost among alerts and escalation. Therefore, the remediation process is largely based on the effectiveness of your incident response. Moreover, for effective incident management, the SOC team of the organization must have all the tools that can help them reduce downtime.

4. Incident Analysis

Once the security incident has been contained and resolved, the security team must analyze the incident. The digital forensics team must conduct a thorough investigation and document everything, including the reason behind the attack. This investigation helps the organization in improving its weaknesses and systems to prevent similar future cyber-attacks.

5. Incident Preparation

The final step in the incident management process is the preparation for future security incidents. Armed with knowledge and the cause behind the cyber threat, the organization can improve its overall security strategies. The organization can implement new measures and offer training to their employees to become more competent for handling security incidents in the future. Organizations can work on improving their detection, prevention, and response strategies for the future. This will help them contain and prevent the security incident as soon as possible, to reduce the damages.

Source: eccouncil.org

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Are you the right choice for a SOC team?

The technology landscape is improving very rapidly. However, it is also closely followed by the growing threat of cyber threats. Thus, resulting in the growing demand for talented cybersecurity professionals who can join the SOC team.

Read More: EC-Council Certified Encryption Specialist (ECES)

The SOC team continuously monitors and analysis the security measures implemented by the organization. Moreover, it also helps in defending against security breaches and mitigating security risks. In this article, we will discuss the skills required to join the SOC team and the basic responsibilities of a SOC team.

Skills Required to Join a SOC Team

The security operations center usually assigns security analysts to work at one of the three levels depending on the experience. Tier I analyst receives and looks into alerts daily. Tier II analyst addresses real security incidents, and Tier III analysts, who are more experienced deal with critical incidents. The following are some of the skills to join the security operations center team.

1. Networking

To maximize damages, cyber threats are largely dependent upon computer networks. It is very rare to have a cyber-attack on a system that is not networked. Therefore, it is crucial that you are skilled and experienced with the fundamentals of networking if you have to join the SOC team. More often than not, security analysts are given information from network device logs. Therefore, you have to know which information means what and how it will impact your analysis.

2. Security

After having an understanding of networking, it is crucial to understand the security fundamentals as well. Having a good understanding of cyber threats allows you to identify behaviors and patterns during your analysis. As you go through the log data, you must quickly identify dangerous or suspicious activities. This is only possible if you have mastered security fundamentals.

3. Incident Response

Working within a SOC team is crucial for the security analyst to have knowledge and know-how of the incident response and handling process. Of course, not all security analysts are involved in the incident response, but most are involved to some extent. Therefore, it is important to know the best practices of incident response and handling.

4. Documenting Incidents

Another important skill for the security analyst who is working with the SOC team is to document incidents. Moreover, incidents are often escalated and passed around within the team. Therefore, it is also good to have good communication skills. Any actions that are taken during the incident response have to be documented properly. It is because this information might be used in legal proceedings.

Responsibilities of a SOC Team

1. Implement Security Tools

SOC team is responsible for implementing and managing security tools to gain insight into the organization’s security environment. Some of the basic tools that the SOC team members work with include intrusion detection systems, intrusion prevention systems, firewalls, and data analytics platforms.

2. Detect, Contain, and Prevent Threats

Another basic responsibility of the SOC team members is to detect, contain, and prevent cyber threats from happening and causing damage to the organization. SOC team members look into various suspicious activities taking place on the network inside the system using the monitoring tools. The team members also perform triage on the alerts received and then respond accordingly.

3. Ensure Business Continuity

Organizations must ensure that their systems are running with no or minimal downtime. Therefore, during a data breach, it is the responsibility of the SOC team to ensure business continuity. It is their responsibility to contain the breach before it reaches key business infrastructure.

4. Audit and Compliance Support

The SOC team members are also responsible for auditing the systems to meet the compliance requirements set by corporate, industry, and government regulations. The SOC team uses security tools such as SIEM, which collects data from across the organization to generate compliance audits and reports.

Source: eccouncil.org

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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

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