Deep Dive Into 6 Key Steps to Accelerate Your Incident Response

March 31, 2023hacker newsWebinars / Incident Response

Organizations rely on incident response to instantly recognize security incidents and enable rapid action to minimize damage. It is also intended to prevent subsequent attacks and future related incidents.

SANS Institute provides research and education on information security. In an upcoming webinar,specifically the six components of the SANS Incident Response Plan, including elements such as preparedness, identification, containment, and eradication.

Six steps of a complete IR

1. Preparation: This is the first phase and involves a review of existing security measures and policies. Conducting risk assessments to find potential vulnerabilities. Establish a communication plan that puts protocols in place and alerts staff to potential security risks. The preparation phase of your IR plan is important during the holidays. This gives you the opportunity to communicate vacation-specific threats and put the wheels in motion to address identified threats.
2. Identity: The identification stage is when an incident is identified – either it has occurred or is currently ongoing. This can occur in various ways. It can be caused by an in-house team, a third-party consultant, or a managed service provider. In the worst case, it can be caused by an incident resulting in a data breach or network intrusion. With so many holiday cybersecurity hacks involving end-user credentials, it’s worth dialing up a safety mechanism that monitors how you access your network.
3. Containment: The goal of the containment phase is to minimize the damage caused by a security incident. This procedure varies by incident and may include protocols such as quarantining devices, disabling email accounts, and disconnecting vulnerable systems from the main network. Containment measures often have a severe impact on business, so it is essential to make short- and long-term decisions up front. This eliminates last-minute scrambling to address security issues.
4. eradication: Once you’ve contained a security incident, the next step is to ensure that the threat has been completely eliminated. This may include investigative actions to determine who, what, when, where and why the incident occurred. Eradication may involve disk cleaning procedures, restoring the system to a clean backup version, or reimaging the entire disk. The eradication phase may involve removing malicious files, modifying registry keys, and possibly reinstalling the operating system.
5. recovery: The recovery phase is the light at the end of the tunnel, allowing the organization to return to business as usual. As with containment, it is best to establish recovery protocols in advance so that appropriate measures are taken to ensure system security.
6. Lesson learned: During the lessons learned phase, you should document what happened and record how your IR strategy worked at each step. This is an important time to consider details such as how long it took to detect and contain the incident. Was there any evidence of malware or compromised systems after eradication? Was it a scam related to a holiday hacker scheme? If so, what can be done to prevent it next year?

How Lean Security Teams Reduce Stress

It’s also important to incorporate best practices into your IR strategy. But building and implementing these best practices is easier said than done without the time and resources.

Small security team leaders face new challenges caused by these resource shortages. A bare-bones budget is exacerbated by not having enough staff to manage security operations, so many lean security teams are unable to keep their organizations safe from the onslaught of mundane attacks. I feel like giving up on the idea. Fortunately, there are resources for security teams in exactly this predicament. Cynet Incident Response Services offer a unique combination of Cynet’s security experience and proprietary technology to enable rapid and accurate incident response.