What Is Incident Response?
Incident response refers to the process of identifying, managing, and mitigating cybersecurity incidents within an organization. It involves the creation of an incident response plan, which details the procedures for detecting threats, containing them, eradicating their sources, recovering from attacks, and learning from these experiences to prevent future breaches.
An incident response process is typically made up of the following stages (explained in more detail below):
- Prepare: Establishing incident response plans, setting up the necessary tools and systems, and training personnel to identify and react to potential threats.
- Identify: Detecting and validating potential security incidents. This may involve monitoring system logs, analyzing network traffic, or observing abnormal behavior.
- Contain: Limiting the impact of an attack. This might involve isolating affected systems or networks, blocking malicious IP addresses, or changing access controls.
- Eradicate: Identifying and eliminating the source of the threat. This can involve removing malware, remediating vulnerabilities, or revoking access of malicious actors.
- Recover: Restoring operations to normal. This can involve restoring systems or data from backups, verifying integrity of restored systems, resuming normal operations safely.
- Learn: Learning from the incident. This includes conducting a post-incident analysis to identify what went wrong, what was done correctly, and how the incident response process can be improved for future incidents.
Why Is an Incident Response Plan Important?
Minimizing Damage
Implementing an incident response plan can help lessen the impact of a cyber attack, enabling your organization to act promptly and limit financial losses, reputational damage, or other adverse effects. When a breach occurs, time is of the essence; swiftly identifying the issue and taking appropriate action helps mitigate potential damages. This includes financial losses from downtime or lost business opportunities, as well as reputational harm due to negative publicity.
Reducing Recovery Time
A comprehensive incident response plan ensures that your team knows precisely what steps to follow when dealing with a security event. By outlining clear procedures for communication, containment, eradication, and recovery efforts, a streamlined incident response process enables organizations to return to normal operations more quickly.
Data Protection
The repercussions of losing sensitive customer information due to insufficient security measures cannot be overstated: it not only results in a loss of trust among clients but also exposes businesses to expensive fines and legal consequences. An incident response plan helps protect valuable data, ensuring that the appropriate steps are taken to contain and eradicate threats.
Compliance with Regulations
Many industries, such as healthcare and finance, have strict regulations regarding cybersecurity. An effective incident response plan is essential for meeting these requirements and avoiding penalties or sanctions from regulatory bodies. For example, organizations subject to HIPAA regulations must demonstrate a proactive approach to protecting protected health information (PHI) through the implementation of an incident response plan.
Incident Response Plan Steps
Step 1: Prepare
The first step in developing an incident response plan is preparation. Organizations should establish a dedicated incident response team, consisting of members with diverse skill sets such as IT, legal, public relations, and management. The IRT should develop policies and procedures that outline roles and responsibilities during an incident, communication protocols, escalation paths, and reporting requirements.
Step 2: Identify
Detecting potential security incidents early can significantly reduce their impact on your organization. Implementing robust monitoring tools like Security Information Event Management (SIEM) systems can help identify anomalies or suspicious activities within your network. Additionally, employee training programs focused on recognizing phishing attempts or other social engineering tactics are essential to ensure prompt identification of threats.
Step 3: Contain
Once a security breach has been identified, the IRT must act swiftly to prevent further damage by containing the threat. This may involve isolating affected systems from the network or temporarily disabling certain services until they can be properly secured. It’s also important to gather evidence related to the breach for later analysis – this could include log files or disk images that might reveal details about how attackers gained access.
Step 4: Eradicate
The next step involves removing any malicious software or unauthorized users from compromised systems while preserving evidence for further investigation. This may require the use of specialized tools such as Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) solutions, which can help identify and eliminate threats in real-time.
Step 5: Recover
The recovery phase focuses on restoring affected systems to their normal state while minimizing downtime. Organizations should have a well-defined disaster recovery plan that includes data backups, system redundancy, and failover procedures to ensure business continuity during this process. Once systems are back online, it’s essential to perform thorough testing and validation before resuming regular operations.
Step 6: Learn
Once the incident has been contained, a review should be conducted to assess response effectiveness and identify areas for improvement. This analysis should be documented in an incident report that includes recommendations for enhancing security measures or updating policies based on lessons learned from the breach.
Incident Response Technologies and Solutions
In the ever-evolving landscape of cyber threats, multiple tools help security teams detect, analyze, and respond to incidents more effectively.
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems collect data from various sources within an organization’s network infrastructure. They then aggregate, correlate, and analyze this information in real-time to identify potential security incidents or anomalies. SIEM tools provide centralized visibility into an organization’s security posture while enabling faster detection of threats.
Security Orchestration Automation & Response (SOAR)
Security Orchestration Automation & Response (SOAR) platforms integrate with existing security tools to automate repetitive tasks during the incident response process. By automating these tasks, SOAR helps reduce human error while speeding up the overall response time for handling incidents.
Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR)
Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR) solutions monitor endpoint devices such as laptops, desktops, and servers for signs of malicious activity or compromise. EDR tools continuously collect data from endpoints which is analyzed using advanced analytics techniques like machine learning algorithms to detect threats. This enables security teams to quickly respond and remediate any identified issues.
Extended Detection & Response (XDR)
Extended Detection and Response (XDR) is an emerging technology that extends the capabilities of EDR by integrating data from multiple sources, such as network traffic, cloud services, and email systems. XDR provides a more comprehensive view of an organization’s security posture, enabling faster detection and response to threats across all attack vectors.
User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA)
User Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) solutions use machine learning algorithms to analyze user behavior patterns within an organization. By establishing a baseline for normal activity, UEBA can identify deviations or anomalies that may indicate malicious activities or insider threats. This helps organizations detect potential incidents before they escalate into full-blown breaches.
Attack Surface Management (ASM)
Attack Surface Management refers to the process of identifying and reducing an organization’s exposure to cyber threats by continuously monitoring its digital assets for vulnerabilities. ASM tools help organizations discover unprotected assets, misconfigurations, and other weaknesses in their infrastructure which could be exploited by attackers.
By deploying ASM tools, businesses can detect and respond to cyber threats more efficiently while limiting disruption to their operations.
How Can Web Application Firewalls (WAF) Improve Incident Response?
A Web application firewalls (WAFs) serves as a protective layer between a web application and the internet. It monitors, filters, and blocks HTTP traffic to and from a web application to protect against attacks such as cross-site scripting (XSS), SQL injection, and other web-based threats.
A WAF can be deployed in different ways, including on-premises, in the cloud, or as part of a Content Delivery Network (CDN). By identifying and mitigating threats at the application layer, a WAF plays a crucial role in an organization’s incident response strategy, helping to prevent incidents before they can cause damage or disruption.
Web application firewalls (WAFs) play an important role in any incident response strategy. Understanding how they’re used can help you in developing an effective incident response policy for your enterprise.
WAF technology plays a different role during each phase, increasing preparedness and enabling rapid data-driven response that helps improve your security posture.
WAF in the preparation phase
Deploying a WAF – The primary tool for mitigating and collecting data from web application incidents. Positioned on the edge of your network, a WAF analyzes your incoming traffic while identifying and blocking all application layer attack attempts. These include common threats such as SQL injections or cross-site scripting (XSS), application-specific exploit attempts (e.g., CMS vulnerabilities) and more.
Through built-in reputational and behavioral analysis, most WAFs even offer a measure of protection against zero-day threats.
Setting up custom security rules – Most WAFs let you tweak their default security rules and introduce custom security policies to address your specific needs. Typically, such rules can granularly filter web traffic, access privileges and user inputs. Custom policies can be issued based on such factors as:
- Request methods (POST or GET)
- HTTP/S header values
- URL parameters
- IP and geolocation data
- Behavior (e.g., access rates on a request or session level)
Configuring access control policies – This is the process of identifying and securing those parts of your website and web application containing sensitive information (e.g., employee/customer records).
Safeguarding sensitive data is usually done using two-factor authentication (2FA), which provides additional access control security. During login, it requires another verification method—something the user has—to access specific areas of an application (e.g., CMS control panel).
A common example is a session access code sent to the user’s mobile phone, which they then enter into a login dialog box along with their username and password (something the user knows).
Security orchestration – The process of streamlining security measures into a cohesive workflow. This includes:
- Predefining the roles and tasks of every security team member.
- Integrating your application’s unique security procedures into a centralized program.
- Standardizing processes to improve response times and minimize errors.
Doing so speeds up mitigation times and frees personnel to perform other tasks.WAF in the incident detection and analysis phase
Once deployed, your security measures will inspect and filter all incoming web traffic. In the event of an incident, they’ll block any malicious request, issue an alert and document details about the attempt in an aggregated security log.
The log includes such information as:
- The perpetrator’s IP and geolocation data
- The attack vector used (type and request details)
- The perpetrator’s HTTP fingerprint
- The entry page for the attempt
Here, relevance and granularity are key. Having access to a detailed security event description, you’ll be able to understand incidents and provide the most appropriate responses.
Depending on the WAF, evidence can be collected and presented in real-time, enabling a nearly instantaneous, data-driven response to any attack attempt.
Additionally, many WAFs come with a SIEM integration option, enabling security analysis using your existing event management tools.
WAF in the post-incident phase
The last phase in the incident response lifecycle is devoted to applying lessons learned during the earlier phases. This is a three-part process that includes:
- Reviewing incident logs to determine if an attack uncovered any possible soft spots in your security configuration.
- Tweaking WAF rules and introduce new policies to eliminate weaknesses.
- Testing the new rules, while being mindful of false positives.
