What is an incident response plan and process?
A cyber incident can cause brand reputation damage, revenue losses, and compliance penalties. With a clear understanding of incident response, your business can protect against cyberattacks and data breaches.
What is incident response?
Incident response refers to the process your business uses to manage a cyberattack or data breach. The process allows you to resolve a security incident and generate insights from it that you can use to prevent similar problems from happening.
There are several items to consider when researching incident response for your organization, including:
Incident Response Planning
You can develop an incident response plan to define incidents and the steps you need to take to mitigate them. This plan describes your incident response team's responsibilities and how to keep your stakeholders up to date until an incident is resolved.
Incident Response Services
You can use incident response services to automatically detect and respond to cyberthreats. These services can be deployed on their own or in conjunction with other cybersecurity services.
Impact Analysis and Prioritization
If you prioritize incident response, you can plan ahead for security incidents and limit their impact. You can also address security vulnerabilities before they lead to cyberattacks and data breaches. Plus, you can use your incident response plan and services to avoid downtime and keep your operations running at peak levels 24/7/365.
In-House or Outsource?
You can employ an in-house security incident response team that consists of your cybersecurity and IT staff. Team members know the ins and outs of cybersecurity and can respond to security incidents.
Instead of hiring in-house staff, you can partner with a managed services provider (MSP) that offers incident response services. Your MSP can automate how your company responds to security incidents.
How to identify security incidents
1. Use Threat Monitoring Tools
A threat monitoring tool keeps you up to date about malware, spam, and other web attacks. It collects information about cyberthreats, provides security insights, and offers personalized incident response tips and recommendations
2. Perform Penetration Testing
Pentesting lets you simulate a cybersecurity incident and look for vulnerabilities in your IT infrastructure. A pentest can help you identify and address your security weaknesses before they lead to incidents.
3. Conduct a Vulnerability Analysis
With a vulnerability analysis, you can assess and prioritize security weaknesses across your IT infrastructure. The analysis shows what incidents you've dealt with and how they've impacted your business.
4. Get Notifications from Employees, Customers, or Third Parties
An employee or customer can notify you about security incidents as they're happening. In addition, an MSP or another third-party vendor can let you know if they are dealing with any issues that indicate a cyberattack or data breach is underway. There are even times when a cybercriminal launches an attack against your business, blocks your access to your data and systems, and demands a ransom to restore access to them.
How to deal with a cybersecurity incident
1. Respond Right Away
Plan ahead for security incidents. That way, you can instantly respond at the first sign of a cyberattack or data breach.
2. Confirm the Incident is Over
Triage a security incident — but don't stop there. After you resolve an incident, investigate the issue, find out why it happened, analyze its root cause, and look for ways to prevent similar problems moving forward.
3. Monitor Your IT Infrastructure
Use security tools that allow you to collect insights into cybercriminals' tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs). Utilize threat intelligence to add context to cyberattacks and data breaches.
4. Ask for Help
Partner with a cybersecurity expert that can teach you everything you need to know about incident response.
How do incident response services work?
A traditional cyber incident response service tracks your end-users, endpoints, and systems. It looks for security anomalies that indicate a cyberattack or data breach is taking place. If the service detects an anomaly, it notifies your incident response team or other stakeholders. Or, if you're using a service that automates incident response, it will address the incident on its own.
Cyber incident response services are often built in accordance with incident response frameworks. As such, they help you comply with the most up-to-date data security guidelines.
Also, cyber incident response services are available that offer proactive threat hunting, threat analysis, and other security features.
Types of Cyber Incident Response Services
1. Preparation and Planning
An incident response specialist can learn about your business and its incident response efforts to date. Then, this specialist can help you develop and maintain an incident response plan and program.
2. Breach Notification Monitoring
You can get notified as soon as a cyberattack or data breach is discovered, then decide what actions to take to remediate the incident.
3. Digital Forensics
You can use a digital forensics service to review digital evidence relating to a cyberattack or data breach. The service helps you understand what happened during a cybersecurity incident. It also provides insights into an incident and the steps you can take to improve your security posture.
4. Managed Detection and Response (MDR)
The best MDR service automatically monitors your IT infrastructure, notifies you about security incidents, and responds to them. It also provides threat intelligence.
Key features of incident response services
1. Intelligent Threat Detection
The service uses artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to generate security insights so you can understand incidents and how to protect against cyberthreats.
2. Proactive Response
You can access threat intelligence to watch for indicators of compromise (IOCs) and automatically stop security incidents.
3. Incident Response Expertise
You can work with incident response experts that can respond to any cybersecurity concerns and questions you have.
4. Superior Outcomes
Every threat hunt, investigation, and response should be performed in alignment with your business' needs so you can achieve the best-possible incident response outcomes.
About managed security service vendors
Today's threat landscape is constantly evolving, with incident response becoming more difficult every day. Threat intelligence is vital. But, some of the top-performing MSSPs still only monitor customers' security systems, leaving them increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks and data breaches.
Ultimately, the top managed security service vendors focuses on business outcomes. At Sophos, we have a team of security experts that track cyberthreats and stop cyberattacks and data breaches from happening. Our security experts do what's necessary to ensure businesses can secure their operations — and get the most value out of their security investments.
Sophos provides:
- Configuration Help: We configure solutions and ensure they provide businesses with the optimal results.
- Custom Solutions: We use Sophos APIs to produce custom solutions that automate repetitive tasks.
- Training: We teach IT staff how to use our products so they can optimize their business' security posture.
Our security experts believe there is no such thing as a "bad" question when it comes to cybersecurity, either. Reach out to us with questions, and our experts are ready to answer them.
Sophos MDR Simplifies Incident Response
Organizations can use our cybersecurity as a service to automatically respond to security incidents or manage them however they choose.
Sophos MDR neutralizes incidents to stop cyberthreats. Our team combines endpoint, firewall, and cloud security technologies to mitigate threats and ensure your network is operational.
What is Sophos’ approach to incident response?
Sophos’s Incident Response Program is designed to swiftly address and manage security incidents to protect customers, products, and the company. Using the broad NIST 800-61 definition of security incidents, Sophos identifies threats through monitoring, testing, and analysis, followed by a structured investigation process to assess severity and determine actions.
To learn more about our in-depth approach to incident response and incident response solutions, please contact us today.
Related security topic: What is a cybersecurity service provider?
