Incident response, sometimes called cybersecurity incident response, describes the processes, technologies, and tools an organization utilizes to detect and respond to cyber threats. It is a strategic approach to minimizing damage, recovery time, and total costs of cyberattacks.
Technically speaking, incident response is under the much larger umbrella of incident management. This refers to your overall cybersecurity strategy, which includes diverse stakeholders from legal to communications to IT. Incident response, on the other hand, refers to how your IT team handles technical cybersecurity tasks and considerations.
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Differentiating terms: incident response vs. disaster recovery vs. business continuity
To avoid confusion, it’s best that we clearly define terms. Incident response, a subset of incident management, ensures business continuity during a security incident, such as a data breach. If, however, data was lost from cybercrime, your business needs to implement a disaster recovery plan.
The simplest way to remember the differences among the terms is to consider their primary goals:
- A business continuity plan aims to maintain critical business operations in the face of an unexpected incident. This plan usually considers a data governance framework.
- A disaster recovery plan aims to restore IT functionality after a disruption, such as those made by threat actors.
- Incident response is designed to identify, contain, and resolve cyberattacks and any problems they cause.
As you can see, all three processes are distinct yet complementary in your overall cybersecurity strategy, ensuring operational efficiency despite interruptions.
How does incident response work?
Incident response generally starts when your security team receives and is notified of a credible and substantiated alert from a security information and event management (SIEM) system. From there, they determine the alert’s severity level and the necessary remediation actions. If the cyber incident is severe and requires time to resolve, your organization may need to consider implementing its backup and data recovery strategy.
What are the types of security incidents?
In this article, we’ve compiled a list of the most common security incidents or cyberattacks. However, here are the top three incidents to be aware of:
- Phishing: Phishing emails are a social engineering tactic that manipulates vulnerable people to click on a malicious link or download a malicious file. This is done by impersonating a reputable brand or person, such as your colleague or boss. These tactics exploit people’s trust and use various psychological tactics to get you to perform a specific action.
- Malware: Malware is software designed to harm your computer system or exfiltrate data. There are many different forms of malware, such as ransomware, spyware, and Trojan Horse virus. Regardless, all malware seeks to exploit security vulnerabilities for a specific gain. Expert tip: Check out this guide on the 10 Best Malware Protection solutions to defend yourself against malware.
- Denial of service: In a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, a bad actor overwhelms a system or network with traffic until it crashes or slows down.
Importance of an incident response plan
A security incident doesn’t only impact operations; it also affects your business’s reputation among customers and the community. These security incidents could have legal ramifications as well, especially if you violate certain compliance provisions like HIPAA or GDPR. You only have to look at IT horror stories to see how quickly one security incident can damage your company for years.
Companies that don’t prioritize incident response run the risk of violating regulations. Human error contributes to these types of mistakes, which are more common when business leaders don’t have a plan. In the heat of the moment, your IT team may make rash decisions driven by fear that may further damage your organization.
A well-thought-out incident response plan outlines exactly what your security team should do during each phase of an attack.
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Steps to creating an incident response plan
There is no one way to approach incident response. You may want to consider looking into the six-step response framework offered by SysAdmin Audit Network Security (SANS) or the incident handling guide made by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). Nevertheless, any good incident response plan generally involves six steps:
- Reduce vulnerabilities: Before an incident occurs, it’s crucial that you conduct a risk assessment to determine any weaknesses in your IT network. Look into strategies to reduce vulnerabilities and the attack surface of your endpoints. This phase also includes writing security procedures and defining roles and responsibilities.
- Identify threats: Your security team can receive multiple alerts of suspicious activity in your IT environment. However, it’s important to assess which ones are credible and which may be false positives. Once a threat has been identified, your security team must learn everything it can about it, including the source of the breach, the type of attack, and the attacker’s goals, if possible.
- Contain threats: Contain threats as soon as you can. The longer malicious actors are allowed access, the greater the damage they can do. Your IT team needs to work quickly to isolate compromised data or applications.
- Eliminate threats: Once threats have been contained, your team must now remove the threat from affected resources.
- Recover and restore: If needed, implement your data recovery plan and monitor affected areas to ensure the attacker does not return.
- Refine: Even after an incident has been resolved, it’s essential that you review what happened and identify any improvements that can be made to your process.
Automating incident response
Your IT team likely receives far more alerts than it can realistically manage. To help them focus on legitimate threats, many businesses use incident response automation. Automation uses technologies such as AI and machine learning to triangulate alerts, identify incidents, and root out threats based on programmatic scripts.
Security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR) is a security tool that allows your organization to automate incident response.
How NinjaOne fits into incident response
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