What Is Incident Response?

Fast and Effective Enough To Detect and Respond To Cyber Threats

What is Incident Response?

Incident response is the process an organization uses to remediate cyber threats. Organizations should have a clear incident response plan in place to limit risk. The overall goal of incident response is to minimize damage to the organization.

When a security event occurs, every second matters. If the event evolves into an incident the organization could experience huge financial loss and damage to its IT infrastructure if it is not mitigated quickly.

Why is Effective Incident Response Important?

An effective incident response process is both fast and accurate. The best way for organizations to minimize financial and reputational losses, while mitigating risks, is to move quickly and carefully through investigation, response, containment, and recovery.

If an organization doesn’t have an incident response process or doesn’t catch a threat in time, they can lose the confidence of their customers, stockholders, board of directors, and the public.

Four Key Challenges to Effective Incident Response

Shortage of Skilled Professionals

Incident response requires skilled and experienced SOC analysts. Today, organizations struggle to hire and keep skilled and experienced cybersecurity professionals. There are more jobs than there are qualified security analysts.

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Too Many False Positive Alerts

Legacy SIEM solutions and perimeter security systems lack the capability to differentiate between an actual threat and a false threat. They all look the same. SOC teams waste time chasing false positives, which can cause them to miss actual threats.
Complex Threats Cause Mean Time To Detect and Respond

Attacks are continuously evolving and becoming more advanced. Many are specifically built to evade legacy signature-based defenses. They use low and slow tactics, such as dormant or time triggered malware, to infiltrate their targets. Detecting these kinds of attacks is difficult and can take weeks to months for an organization to respond and mitigate, which can damage the organization.
Lack of Integration With SIEM /SOAR Tools

Disconnected tools and multiple alerts from various tools make it a daunting process for SOC teams to investigate and accurately respond to incidents. Lack of integration not only delays the incidence response, but the effectiveness of the response.

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Stages of Incidence Response

For incident response to be effective, security teams should take a coordinated and organized approach to any incident. Listed below are important steps that every response program should cover to effectively address the wide range of security incidents.

Preparation

Being proactive, rather than being reactive, is the key to effective incidence response.

Document Incident Response Policies: Establish policies, procedures, and techniques to be able to respond to security incidents effectively.

Guidelines for Incident Response Communication: Establish standard guidelines for seamless communication before, during, and after an incident. Create a communication plan, with guidance on who to contact, how, and when based on each incident type.

Leverage Threat Intelligence: Incorporate new threat feeds and update intelligence on ongoing basis.

Assess Security Posture: Assess your current threat detection capabilities and plan a risk assessment and improvement program.

Threat Hunting & Identification

Monitor and correlate security events in order to detect, alert, and report on potential security incidents.

Threat Hunting: Exercise threat hunting techniques to find incidents occurring in your environment.

SIEM Integration: Having a centralized SIEM that ingests logs from all of your security systems — such as antivirus, firewall, intrusion prevention, and data loss prevention — is a critical tool.

Monitor and correlate security events occurring across various systems in your environment.

Triage and Analysis: Detect potential security incidents by correlating alerts from your SIEM and identify all systems impacted by a security incident.

Alerting and Reporting: Security teams create an incident ticket and document any initial findings and assign an initial incident classification. Incident response metrices help SOC teams to understand how to respond faster and how to improve their performance.

Threat Hunting and Response Using YARA/Sigma

Threat Hunting Architecture

Containment and Recovery

The strategy and next steps for containment and neutralization is based on the indicators of compromise (IOC) and tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) identified during the threat hunting phase. Containment strategies need to be defined for different incidents.

Coordinated Shutdown: Compromised systems are identified and IT/SOC teams perform a coordinated shutdown on all these devices.

Reconfiguration: All infected devices are formatted and rebuilt/reconfigured with new passwords and appropriate security access measures.

Threat Mitigation: All communication is blocked from the identified threat actors’ IP domain to prevent further attacks.

After the system is restored and security is verified, normal operations can resume.

Post Incident Activity

Incident Reporting: Documenting an incident will help to improve incident plans and can be used to prevent similar occurrences from happening in the future.

Continuous Monitoring: Continuous monitoring and staying vigilant while looking for post incident activities can help to mitigate future attacks as threat actors are continuously innovating their attack techniques.

Threat Intelligence: Updating threat intelligence with newer threat feeds can mitigate threat actors from reappearing and prevent future incidents.

Learn what the Securonix Threat Research Team discovered when they analyzed hundreds of real-world insider threat incidents.

Incident Response With Securonix

Provides automated incident response through fully-customizable, out-of-the-box playbooks that help you respond to incidents faster.
Securonix Response Bot automation creates more efficient incident response that is automated and consistent. Tier 1 analysts can respond to incident like a Tier 2 or 3 analysts based on suggested actions learned from previous incidents.
Case management gives analysts an operational workflow to work together on incident response, expediting threat detection and response.
Integrations with other security solutions provides analysts a seamlessly experience to respond to incidents without having to switch between solutions. For example, analysts can remove an endpoint from the network within Securonix.

Transform Your Incident Response Using Securonix

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What Is Incident Response?