Incidence response plans prepare a business to act quickly and effectively after discovering a security breach or cyberattack. Incident responses also exist for real life situations to help mitigate damage done to the environment and reduce the absorption of pollution. Many incident response plans follow the same framework in order to keep consistency when dealing with cyber incidents.
To start, businesses and their employees need to be prepared with knowledge and steps to take in the presence of a cyber attack. This means that the business needs to establish clear guidelines and procedures when encountering a cyberattack. Businesses can also assign roles to employees to help keep the whole mitigating process smooth and efficient. Once employees are aware of the incident response process and properly trained when an attack happens the first thing to do is to identify what is happening. Using monitoring tools or reportings to identify an attack quickly and effectively will help with the response time. By discovering the attack a business can then assess the severity and impact of the attack.
With a basic understanding of the cyber attack and what is going on, a business can then take the next steps to figure out how to contain or limit the spread of the incident. By containing the incident, businesses also now have the ability to more deeply assess the situation to find vulnerabilities or places of origin. This will allow a business to patch or eliminate the root cause of the incident quickly. Simultaneously when vulnerabilities are identified and patched if possible, businesses can begin to recover their systems and re-validate their infrastructures’ integrity.
One of the most important parts of incident response plans is how you can use the experience to learn and gain new knowledge on how attackers breached your system, but also what to do in the case of an attack. Going through the planned-out process will help businesses and their employees further understand their networks and infrastructure. Recording events or details of the incident can be used later to analyze the incident when the threat is fully eliminated. Based on the incident, businesses can then update the incident response plan as well as training for employees.
Last but not least, businesses need to make sure that anyone that they are connected to is aware of the incident not only after the fact but during. With connections knowing about the incident, businesses can team with each other to help further reduce the impact of the incident. If any issues remain from the incident, consider long-term options like improved security controls and continue to iterate and refine network security. Overall, incident response plans are a great way to mitigate cyberattacks and provide valuable lessons to businesses in terms of eliminating threats quickly and effectively