Cybercriminals can access and steal the resources of a business or organization. Incident response is the method by which a business or organization manages digital attacks. The aim of incident response is to minimize loss and speed up recovery. Every company requires an incident response plan that stipulates the actions that must be taken following an incident.
Nettitude is a premium cybersecurity service. You can check them out to learn how incident response works.
Steps Of Incident Response
Businesses and organizations typically create a department for handling incident response. And the following are the five critical steps of incident response:
1. Preparation
This is the most basic step of incident response. It ensures that guidelines are available and that the response team can rely on these guidelines to minimize damage and help the organization recover quickly. The following things are critical in an incident response plan:
- Set clear policies: you should create the policies and agreements that are going to guide your incident response plan. These policies provide an outline to the incident response team, helping them make the right decisions and minimize damage.
- Establish communication practices: one of the critical things following an incident is communication. Quality communication practices ensure that all parties are on the same page and it makes it easy to minimize damage and speed up recovery. And so, an incident response plan should contain quality communication strategies.
- Threat intelligence feeds: it’s extremely critical to have a sharp understanding of how the threat operates. You can achieve this by collecting and analyzing threat intelligence feeds.
- Perform cyber hunting: these are exercises that typically help you discover threats that appear in a similar environment. This is a critical step that helps you to have proactive security.
- Review your threat recognition aptitude: review your capacity to detect threats and update your risk detection systems.
2. Detection And Reporting
At this stage, it’s all about observing various security events, for the purpose of detecting and sending alarms in regard to various security issues. The following things are critical at this stage:
- Screening: this involves inspecting the security activities in your environment. There are various systems and programs you need to deploy to achieve quality results.
- Detecting: this involves identifying prospective security problems by critically examining security hazards in your environment.
- Creating alerts: this phase involves writing down all critical details about the security event and sending alerts to the response team.
3. Analysis
This is one of the most difficult phases following an incident. It involves collecting data and analyzing security events to determine the source of the problem. The following are some of the critical areas that need to be carefully analyzed.
- Endpoint analysis: this is a system of verifying that devices are secure before allowing deployment of the resources of the organization. The response team may piece together a timeline of events to precisely understand the security gaps.
- Binary analysis: as the name suggests, this is a review of the security event at the binary code level. It involves uncovering mean binaries as well as the systems deployed by fraudsters.
- Systems analysis: this involves analyzing various systems to determine the extent of the problem. It is critical as it helps foil future issues.
4. Containment
Following the identification of an incident, it’s essential to contain it. This process helps with minimizing damage and gaining control over the situation. The process of containing the problem may be executed in both a long-term and short-term context.
Once your system is affected by a digital attack, it needs to be shut down systematically. Then the system should be cleaned up and have new security tools installed. If you can determine the IP addresses that digital attackers use, you can block them.
Once the threat is eliminated, it’s essential to focus on repairing the system and ensuring that it goes back to being as stable and reliable as it was before. Depending on the scope of the attack, this can be achieved instantly, or it may take some time.
5. Recovering
As you perform system restoration, you need to also detail the security events, as this enables you to foil future digital attacks. By understanding the operations of your digital attackers enables you to have a pre-emptive security approach.
You also need to watch keenly to see if the threat is terminated or there might be small security threats that linger on. Failing to identify and eliminate threats fully can cause the digital attack to be repeated. It’s also critical to upgrade your business or organization’s security intelligence.