When it comes to cybersecurity, it is not a matter of if but when a cyber threat will target your business. Every industry is affected, with healthcare alone experiencing a 74% increase in weekly attacks compared to 2021. Different types of risks may not be easily noticeable, such as subtle phishing attempts, data breaches, or fake invoice scams. Organizations can be targeted from multiple angles with increasingly sophisticated attacks. This is why having a well-developed incident response plan is essential in any business strategy, as it enables staff to be more prepared.
What Is an Incident Response Plan?
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) provides guidelines for handling threats through an Incident Response Plan. This plan consists of instructions on how to detect, respond to, and recover from a cybersecurity incident. Divided into six steps, namely preparation, identification, containment, eradication, recovery, and lessons learned, each step fulfills a specific purpose and contributes to a prompt and efficient response to security incidents.
Why Incident Response Plans Are Good for Businesses
Incident response plans play a vital role in assisting businesses to promptly and efficiently address cybersecurity threats. However, a significant proportion, as high as 76%, of these plans are not consistently implemented throughout the entire organization. Adhering to a clearly outlined plan enables companies to respond swiftly, minimizing the impact at all levels. Moreover, steps that concentrate on resolving the issue and securely restoring systems also serve to prevent the recurrence of similar problems.
In addition to serving as a guide during a crisis, these plans provide useful insights that can be extremely valuable for legal matters or identifying vulnerabilities in security measures. The regular updates, which are informed by previous incidents, lead to a constant improvement in the company’s ability to handle emerging threats. Moreover, by keeping employees well-informed, these plans also contribute to increased awareness about cybersecurity, thereby enhancing the overall security of the company.
How to Create an Incident Response Plan
In order to handle a suspected data breach, it is important to establish an incident response plan with a series of phases. Each phase contains specific areas that require consideration. These phases include:
- Preparation
- Identification
- Containment
- Eradication
- Recovery
- Lessons Learned
We will examine each phase in greater detail and identify the aspects that require your attention.
1. Preparation
This phase will be the work horse of your incident response planning, and in the end, the most crucial phase to protect your business. Part of this phase includes:
- Ensure your employees are properly trained regarding their incident response roles and responsibilities in the event of data breach
- Develop incident response drill scenarios and regularly conduct mock data breaches to evaluate your incident response plan.
- Ensure that all aspects of your incident response plan (training, execution, hardware and software resources, etc.) are approved and funded in advance
Your response plan should be well documented, thoroughly explaining everyone’s roles and responsibilities.
Then the plan must be tested
in order to assure that your employees will perform as they were trained. The more prepared your employees are, the less likely they’ll make critical mistakes.
Questions to address
- Has everyone been trained on security policies?
- Have your security policies and incident response plan been approved by appropriate management?
- Does the Incident Response Team know their roles and the required notifications to make?
- Have all Incident Response Team members participated in mock drills?
2. Identification
- When did the event happen?
- How was it discovered?
- Who discovered it?
- Have any other areas been impacted?
- What is the scope of the compromise?
- Does it affect operations?
- Has the source (point of entry) of the event been discovered?
3. Containment
When a breach is first discovered, your initial instinct may be to securely delete everything so you can just get rid of it. However, that will likely hurt you in the long run since you’ll be destroying valuable evidence that you need to determine where the breach started and devise a plan to prevent it from happening again.
Instead, contain the breach so it doesn’t spread and cause further damage to your business. If you can, disconnect affected devices from the Internet. Have short-term and long-term containment strategies ready. It’s also good to have a redundant system back-up to help restore business operations. That way, any compromised data isn’t lost forever.
This is also a good time to update and patch your systems, review your remote access protocols (requiring mandatory
multi-factor authentication), change all user and administrative access credentials and harden all passwords.
4. Eradication
Once you’ve contained the issue, you need to find and eliminate the root cause of the breach. This means all malware should be securely removed, systems should again be hardened and patched, and updates should be applied.
Whether you do this yourself, or hire a third party to do it, you need to be thorough. If any trace of malware or security issues remain in your systems, you may still be losing valuable data, and your liability could increase.
Questions to address
- Have artifacts/malware from the attacker been securely removed?
- Has the system be hardened, patched, and updates applied?
- Can the system be re-imaged?
5. Recovery
This is the process of restoring and returning affected systems and devices back into your business environment. During this time, it’s important to get your systems and business operations up and running again without the fear of another breach.
- When can systems be returned to production?
- Have systems been patched, hardened and tested?
- Can the system be restored from a trusted back-up?
- How long will the affected systems be monitored and what will you look for when monitoring?
- What tools will ensure similar attacks will not reoccur? (File integrity monitoring, intrusion detection/protection, etc)
6. Lessons Learned
Once the investigation is complete, hold an after-action meeting with all Incident Response Team members and discuss what you’ve learned from the data breach. This is where you will analyze and document everything about the breach. Determine what worked well in your response plan, and where there were some holes. Lessons learned from both mock and real events will help strengthen your systems against the future attacks.
Questions to address
- What changes need to be made to the security?
- How should employee be trained differently?
- What weakness did the breach exploit?
- How will you ensure a similar breach doesn’t happen again?
No one wants to go through a data breach, but it’s essential to plan for one. Prepare for it, know what to do when it happens, and learn all that you can afterwards.
