Cyber Incident Response Guide: Best Practices, Tools & Strategies

Cyber attacks strike companies every 39 seconds. You cannot endure disastrous consequences without an incident response plan when security breaches take place. Incident response provides processes to identify, contain, and recover from threats; they minimize downtime and reduce costs. If your goal is to maintain customer trust and not tarnish the reputation of y our business, then you cannot neglect building an incident response framework. This guide will answer what is incident response and cover all stages of incident response, including the best cybersecurity incident response practices, step-by-step.

What is an Incident Response (IR) in Cybersecurity?

Incident Response in Cybersecurity is a structured way for organizations to take care of cyberattacks and mitigate data breaches. It involves finding and containing incidents, minimizing damages, and preventing such similar future security events.  An incident response plan can help prevent the spread of an attack, rapidly respond to security events, and recover impacted systems. It also ensures business continuity and ensures that operations go through minimal disruptions.

Incident response planning in cybersecurity also involves complying with the latest regulatory frameworks and data breach notification laws. It enhances security by allowing organizations to work on their security posture and helps them maintain consumer trust and reputation.

Importance of an Effective Incident Response Plan

A well-thought-out incident response plan can drastically cut down the time it takes for a business to recover from critical events. Cyber threats are looming larger than ever, and we deal with an intricate web of technologies and security risks. Here are a few key factors that highlight the importance of an effective incident response plan.

Risk Management

Every organization will face a series of risks, and having robust incident response plans is like setting up safety nets. It can limit potential damages, reduce financial impacts, and safeguard organizations’ trust and reputation.

Business Continuity

Good incident response planning mitigates immediate threats and ensures business continuity. It prevents downtimes, financial losses, and any harm to members of the organization. You can also recover and resume operations just as fast.

Legal and Compliance

Incident response security planning can help meet various legal and compliance requirements. They show a dedication to being committed to protecting sensitive information. Incident response planning will continue to become a key component of several industries, and regulations like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), NIST, and CIS Benchmark will help businesses implement the best measures to ensure the confidentiality, security, and integrity of personal data.

Continuous Improvement

Another reason why incident response plans are needed is because they are a critical component of post-incident analysis. The lessons we learn from incident response planning can be applied to continuously improve the organization’s workflows. Businesses can help employees improve skills, react to new threats, and fortify their overall cybersecurity posture. They can also recognize gaps and opportunities for different areas of improvement.

Types of Security Incidents Requiring a Response

Here is a list of the different types of security incidents that require an incident response.

• Unauthorized Data Access: This is where an individual can gain entry into networks, data, and systems without the proper permissions. It can be due to credential theft, insider misuse, hacking, or exploiting weak passwords.
• Data Breaches and Leaks: Data breaches and leaks happen when sensitive information that is supposed to be confidential or protected is easily accessed, disclosed, or stolen by unauthorized parties. Data leaks can be intentional or accidental in nature due to weak security controls. Their common causes are insider threats, poor security practices, misconfigurations, and cyber attacks like malware, brute force attacks, and phishing. They can also lead to violating user privacy laws and exploit hidden vulnerabilities in systems. The data obtained from data breaches can end up being sold on the dark web or used for nefarious purposes.
• Insider threat attacks: They occur when contractors, employees, or trusted individuals inside the organization can misuse their permissions. Usually, it’s a policy violation against the company’s internal rules, and compliance laws are broken, whether on purpose or not. Common causes of insider threats are disgruntled employees, hate crimes, negligence, and lack of cybersecurity training among employees that can lead to ignorance or careless mistakes. Insider threats can cause data theft, fraud, intellectual property damage, and let outsiders bypass security controls. Some insiders might help external agents gain access to sensitive information by leaking data from inside the organization, thus causing reputational damages and loss of trust.
• Physical security breaches: These are a less common form of a security incident. It involves when unauthorized individuals can manipulate physical security controls to gain access to the premises and take control of sensitive data. Common causes are tailgating, theft of devices like USBs and laptops, and gaining unauthorized access to server rooms and data centers. These can involve office break-ins and trespassing facility entries without having the necessary authorizations.
• Zero-day attacks: Zero-days are unknown software penalties for which there are no updates, patches, or fixes. These are security gaps that haven’t yet been disclosed to the public or found by the developer. Organizations don’t have a way to defend against them. The most common causes of zero-day attacks are poor vulnerability management, cyber espionage campaigns that are government-backed and targeted towards other countries, and attackers who discover security flaws before vendors can find them or know about them.
• Crypto-jacking: It involves secretly installing malicious scripts on systems to gain access to more computing power for mining cryptocurrencies without the account owner’s consent. It is used to slow down systems, reduce performance, and increase power consumption. Common causes of crypto-jacking are phishing emails that deliver crypto-jacking payloads, embedding malicious JavaScript in ads and webpages, and exploiting vulnerabilities found in cloud services and websites.
• Malware and Ransomware: Malware and ransomware strains can infect, damage, and cause unauthorized access conditions in systems. They can manipulate data, spread misinformation, duplicate data, and help attackers steal other sensitive details. Ransomware is a type of malware that can encrypt your data and lock users out of systems. The organization has to make a huge payment for decrypting data. Ransomware attacks are known to be one of the best forms of financial extortion.

Common types of ransomware attacks come in the form of spyware, adware, and trojan horses. The main causes of malware and ransomware threats are compromised remote desktop protocol access instances, third-party software vulnerabilities, drive-by downloads, stolen credentials, unpatched software vulnerabilities, phishing emails, and pirated software and cracks. Supply chain attacks are also very common where malware can be spread through software update infections. Ransomware attacks are also known to be one of the best forms of financial extortion.

Key Phases of the Incident Response Lifecycle

The key phases of the incident response lifecycle are as follows:

• Preparation—The organization prepares to create an incident response plan. It selects the right incident response tools and resources to train teams.
• Detection and Analysis – In this phase of the incident response lifecycle, organizations will focus on accurately detecting and assessing security incidents.
• Containment, Eradication, and Recovery—The business tries to reduce the impact of security incidents. They try to keep the scope of damage as small as possible and mitigate service disruptions.
• Post-Event Activity—This is one of the stages of the incident response lifecycle, where the goal is to learn the lessons of an incident and improve afterwards. It limits the chances of such events and identifies ways to strengthen future incident response activities.

Tools and Technologies Used in Incident Response

There are various cyber incident response tools and technologies used by modern organizations. They are as follows:

• Endpoint Security Solutions – These protect endpoints, users, networks, and assets by continuously monitoring your endpoints and upgrading perimeter defenses. SentinelOne Singularity XDR Platform is a solution that provides advanced endpoint protection and extends defenses.
• Threat Intelligence Tools allow organizations to collect data, analyze logs, and make informed business decisions. They protect brands from reputational hazards and analyze data from diverse and multiple sources. Threat intelligence platforms can be easily integrated as APIs and are ideal for companies of all sizes. Check out Singularity Threat Intelligence for more info.
• SIEM Platforms—SIEM platforms provide comprehensive business security through automated incident response, data analytics, and log management. They can offer protection for cloud apps, users, networks, and others. AI-powered SIEM solutions for the autonomous SOC can help accelerate your workflows with hyper automation and provide significant cost savings. They enable enterprise-wide threat hunting and provide greater visibility into detections and investigations.

Incident Response Plan: What Should It Include?

Your incident response plan should include:

• Rigorous tests—This will involve implementing the best incident response practices, table-top exercises, and realistic incident drills. You will also have to perform performance reviews and calibrate your incident response plan for optimal real-world execution.
• Details and flexibility—Your incident response plan should include components that are scalable, flexible, and detailed. The plan should have instructions that are not too rigid to follow and can accommodate unexpected situations. You need to review your incident response plan at least once every six months.
• Communication and stakeholder management—Your incident response plan should guide communications with senior management, other business departments, the press, and customers. It is vital to let your organization know that everybody is on the same page. The plan should also add transparency and accountability, encouraging members to step up and take their initiatives to contribute to and improve it.
• Incident playbooks—Incident playbooks will provide step-by-step guidance on what to do during different stages of the incident response lifecycle. They will include multiple scenarios, including ones where systems experts are unavailable. You will get tips on troubleshooting and know the necessary steps to accomplish various tasks.

How to Measure the Success of Your Incident Response Strategy?

You can measure the success of your incident response strategy by doing this:

• Conduct hands-on operational exercises – These involve applying practical and in-depth training exercises for responders. You will run various functional incident response plan protocols and procedures.
• Discussion-based tests and tabletop exercises – Your team of incident responses will be walked through various crises scenarios. They will be exposed to several issues that arise during critical security events and you will note how they respond to them. They will also be tested on their knowledge of incident response skills and processes.
• Analyze Key Metrics – Your business will focus on several major KPIs such as – the Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), the Mean Time to Respond (MTTR), the Mean Time to Contain (MTTC), and the Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR). You will also assess compliance costs, frequency of escalations and incidents, and the costs of recovering from security incidents.

Common Challenges in Incident Response

Here are the top common challenges faced in incident response:

• High attack volumes – Cyberattacks and data breaches won’t stop anytime soon. The sheer volume of attacks is rising.
• Lack of expertise—Skills gaps are prevalent, and many companies don’t have the right talent to fight emerging threats. Some organizations lack the budget, knowledge, and resources.
• No collaboration tools – Organizations lack tools to prioritize and remediate incidents as teams.

Incident Response Best Practices for Organizations

Here is a checklist of the best practices organizations can take for effective incident response:

• Prepare systems and procedures – Setting up attack surfaces and preparing for emerging threats is an important part of incident response planning. It’s the first stage and involves outlining your team’s roles and responsibilities.
• Identifying security incidents – This stage uses a combination of advanced AI threat detection tools, network monitoring, and log analytics. The organization can use automation to speed up workflows and scale up to minimize negative impacts.
• Drafting incident containment strategies – What happens if a breach happens? The next logical step is to isolate and quarantine the threat. This is a practice where you isolate affected systems, block malicious IP addresses, and disable compromised user accounts.
• Automated threat remediation – The organization will use various security tools to remediate threats. They will remove malware and patch the latest vulnerabilities, and even use threat intelligence. All updates made to their current incident response plan will reflect based on their key findings.
• Incident response assessment – The business will run vulnerability scans, penetration tests, and breach and attack simulations. They will also do policy reviews and find and fix potential weaknesses before they can get exploited. Stress tests will be done to continuously assess systems and review security controls.

Incident Response Services: When to Outsource?

Here are some reasons to outsource:

• Outsourcing is necessary when you’re short-staffed and don’t have the right tools and mitigation expertise in-house. As threats scale up in volumes, it’s useful to hire outside expertise. Outsourced incident response services can provide extended coverage.
• You will receive unbiased assistance and get a complete view of your legal standing and compliance stats. If you want to respond to incidents quickly, outsourced services can offer instant access to threat intelligence and specialized tools without needing huge capital investments.
• It helps with industry compliance, such as certifications and affiliations with standards like ISO 27001 or NIST, which demonstrate a commitment to high cybersecurity practices. IR providers offer round-the-clock support for immediate access to their services.
• You will get response time guarantees, industry experience, and compatibility with your existing security infrastructure. SentinelOne is a great option.

Read more: Incident Response Services

Incident Response in the Cloud: Unique Considerations

Cloud infrastructures present unique incident response issues with distributed architecture and shared responsibility models. You’ll have to modify traditional incident response practices to virtualized infrastructure where the boundaries of visibility and control are unique. Data residency across regions makes forensic activity and evidence gathering more complex.

If you’re consuming cloud services, have clearly defined processes with your provider for access to logs, network traffic, and system images during investigations. You can improve cloud incident response by using automated containment actions through infrastructure-as-code and API-driven security controls. But you have to exercise your incident response capabilities on a regular basis against cloud-specific scenarios such as credential theft, misconfiguration exploitation, and resource hijacking.

Real-World Examples of Incident Response

Studying real-life incident response can give valuable lessons on how to handle incidents and security violations. These examples show how organizations discovered, isolated, and recovered from different cyber attacks in real-world scenarios:

• Equifax (2017): Upon discovering unauthorized access impacting 147 million consumers, the response team segregated impacted systems and performed forensic analysis, ultimately tracing a web application vulnerability used by attackers for 76 days before it was detected
• Target (2013): Target’s payment card system breach impacting 41 million customers prompted it to adopt enhanced monitoring systems, segment networks, and establish a cyber fusion center to act on threats more swiftly
• NotPetya Attack (Maersk): The shipping company’s response was to rebuild 4,000 servers and 45,000 PCs in ten days and sustain partial operations on by using ad hoc manual procedures
• SolarWinds: The responders developed incident categorization schemes and quarantined the compromised networks upon discovering the supply chain attack while working on bespoke detection tools

How Can SentintelOne Help?

Organizations need a data platform that can ingest data at scale, perform AI-powered analytics, centralize security incident response, and interconnect IT and security platforms for autonomous response capabilities.

SentinelOne’s IR services stand out for their comprehensive approach to managing security threats and incidents. By combining advanced threat detection, real-time response, and automated recovery, SentinelOne equips businesses with the tools to defend against a wide range of cyber threats.

SentinelOne provides protection across endpoints, cloud workloads, and IoT devices to stop and prevent escalations. When corrective action is needed, it can kill, quarantine, remediate, or roll back any potential effects from the threat.

No threat goes unnoticed with solutions such as Vigilance MDR, a managed detection and response service that offers 24/7 monitoring; Singularity XDR, provides extended detection and response across multiple attack surfaces, and Singularity Threat Intelligence, delivers real-time threat insights powered by AI and machine learning.

Conclusion

Incident response is a key part of contemporary cybersecurity planning. You can reduce damage, save dollars, and keep operations running with well-organized response procedures. Cybersecurity only becomes more complex, with threats changing fast and affecting organizations of all sizes. If you plan well, exercise teams regularly, and validate response capabilities, you will respond to inevitable security incidents more confidently and proficiently. New vectors of attack will loom on the horizon, but good incident response fundamentals do not change. Incident response must be viewed as an IT capability and an organizational imperative critical to business resilience and stakeholder trust. Try SentinelOne today.