What is Incident Response?
Incident response is the all-important process of detecting, analyzing, and responding to cyber security threats and incidents. Its ultimate goal is to manage an incident as quickly and efficiently as possible, so that damage to the organization is minimized and similar attacks can be prevented.
No aspect of an organization is safe from the effects of a cyber attack. As well as impeding business operations, a cyber incident is likely to deal heavy blows to reputation and finances, not to mention the potential legal implications triggered by data losses. A fast and well-prepared incident response is vital for an organization’s protection.
How is Incident Response Performed?
When an incident occurs, all should look to the organization’s dedicated incident response team. Whether this is a central team, or a group curated from across the organization, these are the firefighters ready to put out the fire before lasting damage can be done. They guide incident response through 6 phases:
Preparation
The team must create an Incident Response Plan (IRP) that outlines all key procedures and policies that should be followed in the event of an incident, and who is responsible for each including any and every issue the organization might encounter.
Identification
Setting up monitoring to identify an incident and its scope.
Containment
Limiting the damage by isolating affected systems or compromised data, and preventing it spreading further.
Eradication
Removing the root cause of the incident so that it can’t be repeated and restore affected systems.
Recovery
Bringing operations back to normal while testing and monitoring the affected systems to ensure the issue has been remediated.
Future Learning
Reviewing the entirety of the incident, evaluating the success of the plan, and implementing measures to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future.
How Can You Strengthen Your Incident Response?
Insufficient planning strips an organization of its resilience. Combat this by ensuring your IRP is documented, standardized across the organization, and repeatable. Relying on ad hoc processes will result in a slow response to issues, increasing the risk of damage to all facets of the organization.
Keep up to date with your unique threat landscape to ensure strategies outlined in the IRP remain effective to mitigate risk. Continuously monitor for any Indicators of Compromise (IOCs), so your team is ready to put their plan into action as soon as possible.
Perform test runs of your plan to ensure all participants know their role, gaps are filled, and necessary tools are updated. Extend your training beyond the incident response team to ensure all employees are equipped with an awareness of how to avoid falling foul of a cyber attack.
CTI can provide an organization with real-time intelligence about active threats, vulnerabilities, and threat actors to enable faster detection of issues to reduce the effects of an attack.
What Can Intel 471 Do For You?
Intel 471 provides real-time intelligence on cyber threats relevant to your organization. You can be alerted to threats including malware activity, threat actors, and IOCs. With early detection, the incident response team can rapidly respond to potential threats and reduce their impact. By alerting only what is relevant to you, you can be sure there are no false positives, wasting no time in managing the issue.
Our adversary intelligence is unparalleled. Our analysts engage with threat actors in the cyber underground, and in the languages they speak to provide extensive intelligence on the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) they use. We can help you understand where an attack has come from, and the next steps a threat actor will take, so you can prioritize your resources effectively, and develop effective countermeasures in your IRP so that assets are protected against future attacks.
Intel 471 provides access to finished intelligence products, including intelligence reports relevant to your organization, written by CTI experts to inform critical decision making.
Use Intel 471’s Attack Surface Protection suite to identify and secure vulnerable entry points in your attack surface through continually mapping and managing your attack surface. Continuously monitoring for and attending to gaps in your defenses prevents vulnerabilities from being leveraged by threat actors.
Intel 471 is your window to the cyber underground. Our unequaled insight can bolster your organization’s incident responses in many ways, including:
