What is Cyber Incident Response and who manages Incident Response?
Organizations today face a variety of threats that could impact their operations, finances, reputation and consumer trust. In recent years, sophisticated cyberattacks and cybercrime have become some of the greatest imminent threats to organizations as the economic costs of these attacks continue to rise. In the event of such a scenario, cyber incident response is the process of identifying, analyzing and mitigating a security threat or incident in real-time, such as an attempted or successful intrusion, compromise, data breach or network attack.
Cyber incident response is typically carried out by an organization’s Cyber Incident Response Team (CIRT), which is a combination of security and IT staff, legal staff, HR and PR employees along with other relevant experts. It may also be carried out by the SecOps team, particularly if the organization is understaffed or under budget.
How is it effective?
The accuracy and speed at which an organization successfully identifies and mitigates an incident could significantly limit the damage and reduce both recovery time and costs. Effective cyber incident response management could not only improve an organization’s security posture against new and existing cyber threats, but also help reduce the risk of future incidents occurring by helping improve detection processes and identifying risks or potential incidents at an earlier stage.
It can also help improve the organization’s incident response processes, speed up the mitigation and recovery process and eventually help develop a more robust defence against attacks. Another important aspect of the cyber incident response process are lessons learned from incidents that help gain a clear and comprehensive overview of the entire incident and response process that could be used to improve their response efforts in future incidents.
Modern Incident response solutions
Proper planning, a proactive approach to security and a clear action plan are vital to effective incident response. An effective incident response solutions is one that automates and streamlines the process from detection to mitigation. Given the increasing sophistication of cyber attacks, leveraging solutions that incorporate AI and machine-learning powered threat intelligence ingestion, data fusion, analysis tools, automation and orchestration have become paramount. Organizations can more effectively tackle the advances of cybercriminals and develop a stronger security posture against them using modern incident response and management solutions.
