Are you worried about your business continuity? Afraid that one attack will disrupt and permanently damage your business? You work hard to educate your employees and protect your business to enhance your cyber attack prevention. But you can’t prevent every single error or attack in today’s world.
Preparing for the future involves a lot of work. Developing a comprehensive incident response plan is important for safeguarding not only your business data, but the personally identifiable information and data of your employees, clients, and customers as well. Read on to learn more about how to plan for the worst, and call us today to get professional cybersecurity services from one of NE Pennsylvania’s leading consultation companies!
What Are Cybersecurity Incidents?
Any digital or physical breach that can cause damage to your organization’s systems and vital data is a cybersecurity incident. This can range from cyber-attacks from outside users to accidental security policy violations by your users. The most common forms of cyber incidents include:
Ransomware
Ransomware is an old standard in cyber-crime. This attack uses a malicious program to lock a victim’s computer and hold it for ransom unless the attacker receives payment. This type of crime has been used for decades but is rising.
Phishing and Social Engineering
The most insidious forms of crime, these two involve the impersonation of authority figures, trusted members of a team, or someone else with credibility and personal connection to access sensitive or critical business information.
DDoS Attacks
Distributed denial-of-service attacks use many computers to overwhelm a network, effectively taking an organization’s servers offline. This attack is usually done using a botnet, an automated and connected series of computers.
Supply Chain Attacks
You use your information daily to interact with vendors and other steps in the supply chain. This chain represents many steps that can be taken advantage of to distribute malware, steal sensitive information, or otherwise wreak havoc.
Insider Threats
Not all threats come from outside your organization, and not all are malicious. Negligence is more common than you might think, such as through weak passwords or improperly stored information. Malicious threats to organizations are rare, but negligence is common.
Because there are so many forms of cyber incidents, incident response planning and analysis must have as many perspectives and considerations as possible. Planning for the unknown is a difficult process!
Who Responds to Cyber Incidents?
Obviously, when a crime occurs, the authorities should be notified. Still, within your organization, you need to have your own authority in charge of the investigation and other incident response activities. A cybersecurity incident response team (CSIRT) needs to be formed so that you have your best experts prepared to make decisions regarding security incidents.
When a cyber security incident occurs, you need a team with a full perspective of your organization. This high level view allows them to detect attacks, respond quickly, and ensure minimal disruption. Cybersecurity incident response team members should include people from IT, security, legal, and communications departments.
The Incident Response Process
While your business’s incident response plan will need to be specific to your needs and structure, certain simple processes should be built into your plan:
Preparation
You cannot predict the future but can be ready for the worst. Your CSIRT must continuously work to predict and plan your incident response program, including multiple teams and processes. This should also include policy and procedural definitions to provide a good framework for the team’s decisions.
Detection
Security and IT team members should continually monitor network infrastructure for unusual and concerning activity. These potential threats can be identified through tools and programs that help security teams identify and report security incidents as they happen in real time.
Containment
Your incident response plan should include short-term containment measures that isolate threats and prevent further access to your system. However, it should also include long-term containment plans that strengthen your systems’ protection.
Removal
Removing a threat from your systems can take time, during which your system can be damaged or compromised. This reason is why containment is your priority. Only then can you remove the malware or unauthorized user and ensure no traces of the breach remain.
Recovery
Once confident that the affected systems have been completely cleared of outside actors, the incident response services team can restore them to working order. This step requires dedicated backups of your system’s data, ensuring that any data breach doesn’t cause lasting harm. This step should also include insurance and arbitration steps to ensure that damages are compensated.
Review
Your cybersecurity incident response plan should always review any incidents, whether a data breach or a misplaced password. This step can easily and immediately return the plan to the ‘prevention’ phase of planning, informing, and enhancing your future actions with new procedures and training for employees.
How to Plan Your Cybersecurity Incident Response
Even if you trust your team to know how to handle incident response, you should ensure carefully coordinated plans for an incident event. When responding, team members might miscommunicate or get in each other’s way when doing their normal duties.
To prevent error and confusion, your incident response plan should include and define the following:
- The roles and responsibilities of each member of the CSIR team.
- The solutions – whether technological or procedural – are to be enacted.
- A business continuity plan with procedures to restore your systems and data.
- A step-by-step methodology for each member during the response process.
- Plans for communications with leadership, employees, customers, and law enforcement or regulatory bodies, if necessary.
- Procedures for documenting incidents and collecting information for review and legal proceedings, if necessary.
Having definitions and established processes will allow you to practice and rehearse your response methods, ensuring you can respond effectively.
Protect Your Business with Help from Innotek!
Cybersecurity incident response planning is an investment in the future of your business. Critical infrastructure can be toppled without quick assessment and knowledgeable responders. Incident detection and response planning can give your networks a way to mitigate risk and address shortcomings in security by giving new perspectives and communication channels in your business.
Let us help you by providing an outside perspective and access to our expertise in tools and software that will protect your business from attacks. We are a small business that serves the Bloomsburg, Hazleton, Scranton, Wilkes-Barre, and Williamsport areas with friendly and efficient service. Call us today and enjoy the peace of mind a safer business can provide!