Cyberattacks are frequent and indiscriminate, targeting small and large companies alike. Research shows that over 60% of businesses around the globe have endured a cybersecurity incident, and over 50% of those attacks had been directed to smaller companies.
Handling a cyber scam may deplete a business’s resources. For example, a denial-of-service attack against INRS, a university in Quebec, disrupted the operations of the school’s systems. The total cost to restore the systems amounted to over $270,000.
Despite how devastating these attack can be, only 77% of the polled companies had a strategy in place for recovering from an incident or had any of these strategies applied on an ad hoc basis. An IBM Security study detailed the results.
Having a predesigned action plan in a crisis makes personnel more prepared to perform well under pressure, which can mean missed warning signs and mistakes that result in accidents and damages. One of the important steps to preventing this is having an effective cybersecurity incident response plan.
Before delving deeper into the specifics of creating a plan, let s define what a cyber incident is. NCSC defines a cyber incident as a breach of security policy that compromises the integrity of the system or gives unauthorized access to a third party.
These cyber threats can cause a breach. Here are some that small and medium-sized businesses have to struggle with:
And cuts down the expenses incurred during security breaches. Without a plan, security teams are left flying by the seat of their pants each time they overstep their bounds. This can create them scrambling, as though searching for something, without locating anything. As a result, recovery costs are more elevated.
Depending on what type of business you run and the area in which you operate, you might create a response plan as a mandate, rather than to welcome it. As an example, the external data security requirements of California’s Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) often demand that companies develop a cyber-response strategy. In addition to this, it’s a necessity for your company’s ISO 27001 certification.
With an incident response methodology in place, you will be able to practice constant evaluation and revision to better your cyber security preventative measures. Each subsequent incident will give you more understanding about how to approach similar situations.
An incident response plan is a document that provides a methodical approach to preventing cybercrimes by developing, detecting, containing, and eradicating them. This plan should detail how to handle various events as they arise, along with how to return the system to its default settings and how to validate whether any missteps contributed to the incident.
But a great security plan goes well beyond merely addressing malware. It must also pay attention to your internal communication, PR, legal issues, and cybersecurity insurance.
These are the types of questions you want to have prepared answers for.
Response plans are created in accordance with a given school of thought to provide procedural directives sequentially, preventive actions at the beginning of the document, and selective recovery methods at the end.
Depending on the school of thought, response plans might have 4 to 6 phases. (In some situations, timely containment, elimination, and repair are merged into one block).
Here’s a quick summary of what to consider as you make out the plan for each:
This is when preparation begins: appointing supervisors, establishing command sectors, setting up a war room (yes, that’s an actual thing that people do), and listing attack vectors and response procedures. This can allow you to be in charge of whatever happens if a security breach happens.
Being hit may be one of the most difficult aspects of event response, but you can make detecting attack indications and early indicators easier by establishing and following logging and monitoring policies. You can also take help from Terraeagle to view procedures created by certain malware and cross-reference them with your own functions.
The containment phase involves quarantining malware: blocking a system, revoking permissions to user accounts or disabling functions are just a few choices you have for segregating malware. Think about what techniques to use based upon what type of attack you’re dealing with.
The purpose of this step is to end the attack completely in its tracks. Some of the tools used at this stage overlap with the containment stage, and again, your choices depend on the nature of the incident. For example, in a phishing attack you can suspend a compromised account to disarm the attacker. And a malware infection can be eradicated by restoring the system from a clean snapshot.
During the recovery process, your goal is to have your damaged system up and running again while enhancing the security of the system. For instance, go to a trusted secondary source to restore components that were compromised during the incident.
The final step is composing a plan of action to implement the knowledge acquired during the incident. Assess the mistakes that led to the assault, correct them, and promote protection policies to the team.
Here, we’ve listed some tools that you’ll want to keep handy, as well as useful practices for different stages of the response process.
So you know who to contact in an incident, both inside the team and out.
to analyze suspicious files and links, perform digital forensics
To roll back the system to a clean state using a trusted backup
Determines how long the data is kept to help security specialists perform analysis
Resources such as the Terraeagle Incident Response tracker help keep track of and study existing threats
A formal classification of incident difficulty that helps choose a containment approach:
immediate or strategic
Establish a guideline for what is normal system behavior to detect anomalies
This is a practice of comparing logs to find discrepancies
Backups of the code stored on a dedicated server can be used to replace compromised files with clean ones
It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. But if you know in which to search, then you’re scanning that same haystack with a metal detector, and picturing that needle with the aid of a magnet.
Files, processes, and network activity left behind by malicious programs are signs of compromise or IOCs; they vary from malware family to family. Organizations record and catalog these traces in publicly available databases.
If a suspicious action was detected, it may indicate the presence of malicious software in your system. This can permit Terraeagle a quick identification of compromised customers.
Cyber incident response is a broad subject that needs unique preparation for every organization. Depending on the type of business and industry, there are numerous different threats, attack vectors, and approaches.
Perhaps that’s why so many companies avoid creating cyber incident response plans. And it really does seem like a daunting task. But don’t let that stop you even a basic strategy is better than no strategy at all. And a lot of smaller businesses can keep it basic.
Just remember the generation old wisdom — better safe, than sorry.
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