Understanding Incident Management: How Can We Help?

Cybercrimes are an everyday hot topic, and it is something that is discussed in almost all board meetings nowadays. Every now and then, we hear in the news that some organization or individual has become a victim of cyberattacks. In the case of an organization, the unavailability of critical infrastructure or the unauthorized disclosure or modification of confidential information affects the business severely. The best way to encounter such cyberattacks is to believe that they are inevitable, and when this inevitable happens, you should be ready to manage the incident in such a way that the impact is minimal.

What is an Incident Management?

Incident management is a formal name for the business practice of identifying, managing, and resolving security incidents in a timely and efficient manner to minimize their impact on an organization.

Essential Elements for Effective Incident Management

• Preparation: The first step is to establish incident response policies, procedures, and guidelines for security incident management. Preparation is done across all three domains: people, processes, and technology.
• Identification: Next is identifying that an incident has occurred and promptly recording and categorizing it. The incident can be reported from any source, such as users or infra-monitoring tools. It must be categorised according to its type and severity.
• Containment: In this phase, the incident response team begins to interact with affected systems or infrastructure components to prevent further damage. The containment can be at the source level or the destination level.
• Eradication: Next is treating the underlying cause, such as the blocking of an IP address or the removal of a suspicious user account, and addressing the vulnerabilities to ensure that the threats are completely removed from the environment.
• Recovery: It is the process of restoring the system to a known safe state, validating that backup copies are safe or unaffected by the incident before restoration, and testing to ensure that the systems are working properly after restoration.
• Lesson learned: In this step, all the lessons learned are recorded; it is important to note these to understand what went wrong and what can be done to improve the incident response capabilities and also prevent the incident from recurring.

We, Cybersec Knights, are one of the best cybersecurity companies in India and can help your organization establish a robust security incident management process in multiple ways, such as

• Provide rich knowledge and industry experience in incident management to implement the right set of policies and processes.
• Supplement your internal security teams with the required expertise, personnel, and tools to effectively manage incidents
• Assist in drafting and improving the incident response plans and strategies, identifying the right stakeholders, and assigning them roles and responsibilities before, during, and after the incident.
• Help in performing the post-incident analysis thoroughly to identify the vulnerabilities, record the lessons learned, and understand what went wrong and what can be improved to increase the effectiveness of the overall incident response management process.
• Conduct regular training to ensure people are aware of their responsibilities and what to expect from them as part of incident management.
• Ensure your organization’s incident management process is in alignment with regulatory and compliance requirements

It is to be noted that the above-mentioned are just a starting point for any organization, and a lot is to be done to identify what the organization and business needs are and how you can analyze them to most effectively learn from the incidents and continuously improve your security posture. We, as part of our security consulting service, can be your trusted advisor in your journey toward achieving cybersecurity maturity. If you want to implement an incident response management process or have any other security requirements and don’t know where to start, REACH OUT TO US TODAY for the free consulation.