Incident response management involves following a systematic approach to tackle cybersecurity incidents and security breaches within an organization. The primary objective of incident response is to detect genuine security incidents, gain control over the situation, minimize the harm caused by an attacker, and decrease the time and expenses associated with recovery.
Incident response management commonly involves having formal documentation that outlines procedures for incident response. Such procedures should encompass all stages of the incident response process, which include preparation, detection, analysis, containment, and post-incident cleanup. By adhering to these procedures, organizations are able to mitigate damage, prevent additional losses, and ensure compliance with relevant regulations.
Why is incident response important?
Responding quickly to an incident within your organization can minimize losses, recover processes and services, and decrease exploited vulnerabilities. Failure to effectively contain an incident can result in severe consequences, such as a data breach. Incident response serves as the initial defense against security incidents and, in the future, aids in establishing a set of preventive measures to avoid breaches.
If an incident is not addressed promptly, it has the potential to become a more severe problem, leading to significant consequences such as the loss of data, crashes in the system, and costly remedial measures. By responding to incidents effectively, one can halt an attack immediately and minimize the potential risk that future incidents may pose.
Having a well-developed incident response plan is crucial for your organization to be prepared for various risks, whether anticipated or not. Effective incident response procedures enable you to promptly recognize security incidents as they happen and implement the most effective strategies to prevent further breaches. Incident response plays a vital role in ensuring uninterrupted business operations and safeguarding your confidential information.
When considering your response strategy, it is important to anticipate a wide range of incidents as even minor ones can have lasting effects on your organization’s business operations and reputation. Apart from the technical challenges and the costs associated with data recovery, there is also a risk of facing legal and financial penalties that could result in significant financial losses for your organization.
Key Elements of Incident Response Management
The main components of an incident response management program consist of an incident response plan, a team accountable for incident response, and tools utilized to simplify and automate various stages of the process.
Incident Response Plan
The incident response planning should provide detailed instructions on how your team should approach the various stages of incident response, designate responsibilities for each team member, and outline the required documentation and notifications.
- Respond to threats
- Triage incidents to determine severity
- Mitigate a threat to prevent further damage
- Eradicate the threat by eliminating the root cause
- Restoring production systems
- Post-mortem and action items to prevent future attacks
Incident Response Team
In the event of a security incident, it is important that incident response teams have clarity on their responsibilities. Typically, these teams consist of various roles which should be well informed about their specific duties.
- Incident response managers
- Security analysts
- IT and security engineers
- Threat researchers
- Legal and risk management
- Corporate communications
- Human resources management
- External security forensics experts
Incident Response Tools
If present in the organization’s environment, incident response teams can leverage the following security tools to effectively detect and even automatically respond to security incidents in modern security organizations.
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)—collects data and logs from applications, infrastructure, network security tools, firewalls, and so on. Correlates data from multiple sources, generates alerts to inform security teams of malicious activity, and enable further investigation.
- Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)—typically deployed as agents on laptops, workstations, servers, and cloud endpoints. Can detect threats on these devices, enable real time investigation of breaches, and can perform automated mitigation such as isolating a device from a network or wiping and re-imaging it.
- Network Traffic Analysis (NTA)—captures, records, and evaluates network data and communication patterns, looking for suspected malicious traffic. Enables detection and response to security incidents traversing the core network, operational networks, and cloud networks.
Steps of Incident Response
1. Preparation
To prepare for cybersecurity incidents, your incident response team should follow these step-by-step actions.
- Form an internal incident response team, and develop policies to implement in the event of a cyber attack
- Review security policies and conduct risk assessments modeled against external attacks, internal misuse/insider attacks, and situations where external reports of potential vulnerabilities and exploits. (NIST provides a good framework.)
- Prioritize known security issues or vulnerabilities that cannot be immediately remediated – know your most valuable assets to be able to concentrate on critical security incidents against critical infrastructure and data
- Develop a communication plan for internal, external, and (if necessary) breach reporting
- Outline the roles, responsibilities, and procedures of the immediate incident response team, and the extended organizational awareness or training needs
- Recruit and train team members, and ensure they have access to relevant systems, technologies and tools
- Plan education for the extended organization members for how to report potential security incidents or information
2. Identification
The incident response team is called into action based on certain criteria. Monitoring tools, log files, error messages, firewalls, and intrusion detection systems collect events from IT systems. These events need to be examined by automated tools and security analysts to determine whether anomalous events indicate security incidents. Merely observing someone attacking a web server does not automatically mean a compromise has occurred – security analysts must consider various factors, such as changes in behavior and the generation of new event types.
Once an incident is identified, it is necessary to inform the incident response team, who will then coordinate the necessary response to the incident.
- Identify and assess the incident and gather evidence.
- Decide on the severity and type of the incident and escalate, if necessary.
- Document actions taken, addressing “who, what, where, why, and how.” This information may be used later as evidence if the incident reaches a court of law.
3. Containment
Once your team identifies a security incident, the objective is to prevent any additional harm. This involves:
- Short-term containment — an instant response, so the threat doesn’t cause further damage. This can include taking down production servers that have been hacked or isolating a network segment that is under attack.
- System backup — you should back up all affected systems before you wipe and reimage them to acquire a “current state” or forensic image. A forensic image is a bit-for-bit copy of a hard disk, or a specific disk partition. Disk images are created after an incident to maintain the state of a disk at a specific point in time and thus provide a static ‘snapshot,’ which you can use as evidence of the security incident, and to investigate how the system was compromised.
- Long-term containment — While making temporary fixes to replace systems that have been taken down to image and restore, , rebuild clean systems so you can bring them online in the recovery stage. Take measures to prevent the incident from recurring or escalating: install any security patches on affected and associated systems, remove accounts and backdoors created by attackers, alter firewall rules, and change the routes to null route the attacker address, etc.
4. Eradication
In order to handle the threat and restore the initial systems to their original state, or something close to it, the team must first isolate the root cause of the attack. They should then eliminate any threats and malware, as well as identify and address the vulnerabilities that were exploited to prevent future attacks. It is important to note that these steps may alter the configuration of the organization. The ultimate goal is to make necessary changes while minimizing the impact on the organization’s operations. This can be accomplished by promptly preventing further damage and reducing the amount of exposed data.
To rephrase the text step by step without adding or removing information, we can approach it as follows:
- Identify and fix all affected hosts, including hosts inside and outside your organization
- Isolate the root of the attack to remove all instances of the software
- Conduct malware analysis to determine the extent of the damage
- See if the attacker has reacted to your actions – check for any new credentials created or permission escalations going back to the publication of any public exploits or POCs.
- Make sure no secondary infections have occured, and if so, remove them.
- Allow time to make sure the network is secure and that there is no further activity from the attacker
In order to verify that the affected systems are clean, it is important to ensure your team has removed any malicious content. This involves patching any vulnerabilities that may have been exploited by the attacker or replacing weak authentication mechanisms with stronger ones.
5. Recovery
The purpose of this phase is to reintegrate affected systems back into the production environment, considering each step carefully.
To prevent further incidents, it is important to follow a methodical approach. Begin by restoring systems from backup, ensuring compromised files or containers are replaced with clean versions. Then, rebuild systems entirely from the ground up, install patches, change passwords, and strengthen network perimeter security by modifying boundary router access control lists and firewall rulesets, among other measures.
First, determine the duration required to monitor the network and endpoint systems that have been impacted, along with the method for ensuring that these systems are operating correctly. Next, evaluate the financial implications of the breach, encompassing the expenses associated with decreased productivity, the number of hours expended on resolving the issue and implementing necessary measures to regain normalcy, as well as the cost of complete recovery.
