The incident response process is crucial in determining how successfully your company recovers from a security incident or cyber attack. What many companies may not realise is that these processes need to be set in stone and practised diligently if attacks or breaches occur.
It is estimated that by 2021, cybersecurity damages will hit USD $6 trillion. At Triskele Labs, we always recommend that incident response processes are in line with industry standards and best practices so that companies have a greater capacity to prevent additional fallouts and economic loss.
In this post, we explore five steps that need to be part of your incident response efforts for more effective responses to even the most damaging cyber-attacks.
They say that a failure to plan is a plan to fail and this is especially true for the cybersecurity incident response process.
To begin with, you need to lay down basic guidelines and policies that will guide organisational practice in the event the unthinkable happens. These policies, while being flexible, must possess a certain rigidity to ensure that processes are followed in certain scenarios.
As part of this process, make sure you look into your threat detection capabilities. This is pivotal because, in the absence of powerful threat detection, you won’t know there’s a problem, to begin with. Other things to consider include ensuring that you have a steady stream of insights and intelligence while you’re responding to attacks.
Beyond just laying the groundwork, you also need to ensure that your incident response process comprises powerful firewalls, intrusion prevention software, and other detection software to ensure that low-level threats, at least, are detected and brought to your attention.
Reporting is a major element of threat detection, so make sure you’ve activated reporting features in your cybersecurity systems and tools, so you know what your common areas of vulnerability are.
If you find yourself with a cybersecurity incident on your hands, you will need to leverage serious threat analysis tools so you can learn as much as you can about the attack or incident. This will undoubtedly help you shore up your defences in the right places, including detecting endpoints where cybercriminals may have left certain tracks or evidence behind.
At this point, documenting the compromise experienced across your systems, accounts, and equipment is pivotal so you can contain and neutralise any threats. Your goal at this stage of the incident response process is to investigate and analyse the breadth and scope of the attack.
Much like the analysis stage, this is something that can only be done in the event of a cyberattack or incident. Once you’ve gathered the data you need, it’s time to take remedial action.
Remedial action primarily comprises shutting down systems that have been attacked, wiping them of all their data and then rebuilding them from scratch. Sound like too much work? That’s precisely what awaits you if you’ve been hit by a cyber-attack and is the reason why we emphasis on preventative action over remedial strategies.
In this process, you can also issue threat mitigation requests, which is where you block communication from certain domains or IP addresses you believe cybercriminals are using to gain access to your systems and devices.
Once the threat has passed, don’t allow yourself to be lulled into a false sense of security. Your follow-up or post-incident activity is just as crucial as any other within your incident response process.
Begin by completing a report on the incident and detail the nature and specificity of the attack and the remedial measures taken. Make sure you also put in place software or processes that monitor affected systems to detect any threats, given that it’s possible that cybercriminals may attempt to breach your systems in the same way again.
At this stage, it’s also imperative that you make changes wherever necessary to your security policy as well as update your threat intelligence feeds. In this process, you’ll also be able to identify preventative measures that may serve you better in the long run.
The incident response process is a major element of any organisation’s cybersecurity strategy (or needs to be, at the very least) and does determine how successfully you prevent or recover from cyber-attacks.
While certain attacks can’t be anticipated, the least you can do is ensure that you respond well, gather crucial data, and prevent attacks of a similar nature in the future.
For support on building out your incident response process, speak to our team at Triskele Labs today.
