Cyber Incident Response Planning

Constantly on the radar of organizations, worried about cybersecurity. This is because they’ve taken cognizance of the likelihood that sooner or later. They would become victims of a security event.

Sensitive data and personal information are the new gold in the digital era, and cyber thieves are naturally constantly in chase of this goldmine. And because it’s just a matter of time until a firm is attacked. It would be prudent to be prepared with a robust incident response strategy. But what does an incident response plan truly consist of and what are the critical 7 cyber incident response phases?

In this article, we explain the 7 steps of the cyber incident response process and how you may design your own successful and compelling cyber incident response strategy.

What is an Incident Response Plan?

Before we dig into what the 7 incident response stages are, it is necessary to get into a quick overview of Incident Response Planning.

A Cybersecurity Response Plan, defined simply, is a plan of action that your firm will take when a security incident happens. It should ideally be a crisp, succinct, to-the-point document that specifies the reaction procedures to be done by the incident response team (IR team) and the information security team when a ransomware assault or a cyber-attack does occur.

The strategy should enumerate the duties and responsibilities of everyone in the executive team and management who may be engaged in the incident handling process.

What needs to be done with the impacted user accounts and the affected systems? What chain of communication needs to be followed? Who has to be notified when, how and by whom? Do the law enforcement authorities have to be notified and if yes, when?

All these concerns relevant to the immediate aftermath of the time in which the event happens should ideally be included in the reaction plan.

You may have a look at our FREE Incident Response Strategy Template to start working up your own incident response plan.

What are the seven stages of cyber incident response?

As to the National Institute of Standards and Technology or NIST as it’s generally known, an incident response plan contains 4 primary components. However, many cybersecurity professionals divide this down into a more thorough or detailed list of 7 steps of incident response. So let’s have a look at what these 7 stages are:

1. Preparation:

As the name implies, this phase of the incident response plan begins before the event or data breach ever takes place. It is the final step that may make or break your reaction to cybersecurity incidents.

The preparation stage of Incident Response Planning takes into consideration that the company is extremely likely to be attacked sooner or later and aims to equip the firm and its key stakeholders for this near likelihood.

This phase is all about risk assessment, identifying where the largest vulnerabilities are, which assets are most likely to be targeted, and what the firm will do once they are attacked.

Defining clear routes of communication, identifying which response checklists will be followed. Ensuring sure business continuity plans are in place etc. are all part of this essential step of incident response. Offering high-quality cybersecurity training to your personnel also comes within the purview of this phase.

2. Identification:

This step is clearly all about recognizing the event or cybersecurity breach that has happened. Identifying the breach in the ‘Golden Hour’ is vital to ensure the cybersecurity catastrophe doesn’t spiral out of hand.

This step begins with determining whether the incident in question is indeed a cyber-attack and if yes, how severe is it? Filtering out false positives makes up a large portion of this step.

Then follow queries about the components of the company that have been compromised. What specific harm is the event causing? Classifying the cybersecurity event based on the type of the attack is also part of this step of incident response.

3. Containing the situation:

Controlling the effect of the assault makes up the second element of incident response. You must already have a plan in place regarding how to limit the cyber event from snowballing. Since we know, merely deleting everything isn’t ever the best approach as you might miss out on vital evidence in the process.

Make sure that within the containment phase of incident response, you take short-term and long-term strategic factors into mind. Aspects like which systems will be taken down in case of a breach and what backup methods are in place must be reviewed at this step.

4. Eradication:

This phase in incident response focuses on eradicating the source of the breach. Once you’ve controlled the issue and zeroed in on the primary underlying cause of the problem. You need to work out a method to remove it.

Apart from safely cleaning out the virus, this phase also places emphasis on fixing vulnerabilities and upgrading obsolete versions of software.

5. Recovery:

Once the vulnerabilities have been fixed and malware has been eradicated, recovery or restoration is the next process. This stage focused on getting the systems up and operating again.

Monitoring the systems and making sure that they’re properly patched up is crucial to operations swinging back to normal again.

6. Lessons Learned:

One of the most crucial parts of any form of incident response preparation is reflection. This is also sometimes referred to as ‘Post Incident’ activities. Looking back at the event and reviewing how it was handled, measuring if the response plans were adequate and examining. Whether all key decision-makers and stakeholders acted with agility and precision… These are some of the questions that you might ask in this phase of incident response.

If any modifications are to be made in the incident response plan. This would be the phase to introduce them to. Refer to our Cyber Event Response Strategy Template to evaluate whether your plan covers all the key parts of a successful incident response.

Many firms also want to get external specialists or cybersecurity advisers on board. At this time to assist them to analyze current incident response procedures and how they may be improved moving ahead.

7. Test to Build Muscle Memory:

Congrats, you managed to withstand a major security event. But don’t spend too much time rejoicing. Your hackers aren’t going to give up. In fact, at this very moment, they’re undoubtedly scheming how to strike again and hit harder.

This is why you need to regularly test and rehearse your incident response plans and attempt to uncover any vulnerabilities or weaknesses in them that fraudsters may try to exploit next.

There is no time to relax in the cybersecurity cat-and-mouse chase so sadly you can’t truly take a vacation. You need to start testing any improvements you may have recently made to your incident response strategies in this step.