Incident Response
What Is Incident Response?
Incident response is your organization’s formal investigation into a cyber incident. This means your team is responding to an active threat actor within the network or activities such as ransomware, cryptomining, data theft, malicious insider, etc… Anything that violates the cybersecurity policy or poses potential legal ramifications to your organization or your customers constitutes an incident and should be treated as such.
The importance of Incident Response
Every organization answers to some sort of SLA, regulatory, or compliance requirement which can lead to serious damage if violated. Damages can come in the form of brand-name damage, loss of customer loyalty and trust, heavy fines, loss of certifications, operational downtime, or even prison time. An investigation is the only option when it comes to an incident.
When should you conduct an Incident Response Investigation?
As soon as your organization has identified indicators of compromise suggesting a breach, then a security incident response plan needs to be executed. The sooner a plan is enacted, the better, as not only are threat actors are great at hiding their tracks making it challenging to eradicate the adversary, but also for the sake of securing digital forensic data needed for analysis. This includes data on data, volatile memory, network activity, registry values and much more.
How does Incident Response work?
An incident response follows a popular framework called PICERL. Prepare. Identify. Contain. Eradicate. Remediate. Lessons learned. Black Cat security partners with your organization to spearhead for each phase of the process. We will help your business respond with informed counter-efforts that gain immediate threat visibility, preserve digital forensic evidence, eradicate the TA, and reduce the overall impact to your business.
Stakeholders
- Incident Response Team: The team responsible for detecting, investigating, containing, and mitigating the effects of a cybersecurity incident or attack.
- Enterprise IT: IT staff members are responsible for maintaining the organization’s network and systems, and they play a critical role in detecting and responding to cyber incidents.
- Management / Senior Leadership: Management oversees the overall incident response strategy and provides the necessary resources and support to the IRT.
- Legal: Involved in a cyber incident response to assess the legal implications of the incident and to provide guidance on compliance with laws and regulations.
- Public Relations / Corp Comms: Responsible for managing the organization’s reputation and communicating with the public, media, employees and other stakeholders about the incident.
- Law Enforcement: may be involved in a cyber incident response to either assist with investigating the incident orcollect evidence as part of a larger ongoing investigation.
Deliverables
- Incident Response Report: This is broken into two categories:
- An executive summary of the incident, including the date and time of the incident, the type of attack, the scope of the incident, and the initial response.
- A low-level technical analysis of the incident, including the source of the attack, the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by the attacker, and the extent of the damage.
- Recommendations for Improvements: The incident response team may provide recommendations for improving the organization’s cybersecurity posture to prevent similar incidents in the future. This may include changes to policies, procedures, and technical controls.
- Lessons Learned: The incident response team may conduct a post-incident analysis to identify lessons learned from the incident and provide recommendations for improving the incident response process.
- Documentation: The incident response team may document all actions taken during the incident response process, including the detection, analysis, containment, eradication, and recovery phases. This documentation may be used for future reference and to improve the incident response process.
Benefits
Partnering with Black Cat Security means partnering with hardened, seasoned, cyber professionals who boast more than theoretical knowledge. Our engineers have conducted Incident Response investigations of every kind, for small, medium, and Fortune 1000 companies. We understand what it takes to get an organization operational again through practical knowledge. Our professionals set realistic expectations with achievable goals.
