How to be Resilient Against Cyberattacks With Incident Response (IR)

Ransomware attacks continue to evolve, while cybercriminals are finding new techniques to extort more funds than ever from healthcare, government, manufacturing, education, and private sectors worldwide. These high-profile attacks stress the importance of cybersecurity incident response (IR) and IR planning to identify, prevent and respond to business disruptions and avoid millions in losses. 

But what is cybersecurity incident response, and why is it important? After reading this blog, you will understand the basics of IR and how a comprehensive and tested response plan can help get you through an incident in a more efficient and resilient fashion.

What Is Cybersecurity Incident Response (IR)?

Cybersecurity incident response is a methodical process an organization uses to handle a cyber threat. The goal of IR is to help an organization quickly detect and respond to threats to minimize damage and reduce recovery time and costs. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, there are four critical phases in IR: preparation; detection and analysis; containment, eradication and recovery; and post-incident activity.*

Setting the framework in an incident response plan for your company sets the stage if an incident does occur because you’ll be prepared to tackle the incident with the steps outlined and get back to normal operations in a timely manner. An IR plan gets all the right people involved from the start, assigns roles, and advises on what to do and at what stage in terms of responding to the attack with your security operations center (e.g., shutting off power to all servers to prevent the attack from growing).

Why You Need Incident Response

When a cybersecurity incident is not adequately handled, it can have very damaging outcomes, including data loss, high costs, and harm to your organization’s reputation. The time to identify and mitigate threats is of the essence when it comes to outlining an IR plan. An organization must understand that the objective is to have a team in place that can quickly mitigate and restore business operations as fast as possible. An effective cybersecurity incident response strategy’s goal is to:

• Identify the threat. 

• Minimize loss.

• Fix vulnerabilities. 

• Restore operations.

• Strengthen security to avoid future attacks.

IR is a crucial component to any organization, regardless of industry and size. Ransomware attacks can cost an organization upward of $4.4 million per incident.**

What You Can Expect From an Incident Response Vendor

Some organizations cannot completely eradicate cyber threats on their own. IR can be overwhelming, which is why many organizations turn to managed detection and response (MDR) providers and MSSPs for the planning and execution of their IR plan. The clock is ticking once they identify a threat, and organizations need specialized cybersecurity experts to help them respond to a compromise. 

Ransomware groups can go from entry to total encryption of your system within an hour. Some common entry methods are: 1) email attachments or links, 2) legitimate credentials that were stolen, and 3) exposed remote desktop protocol services or unpatched remote access devices.

With Pondurance as your cybersecurity incident response partner, you are better prepared to successfully mitigate threats and always have a team of experts armed with leading technologies to respond and mitigate even the most sophisticated cyberattacks.

Should you experience or suspect a breach, you have access to the Pondurance IR team. Our team goes to work, quickly utilizing our proprietary technology suite and experienced team of responders, handlers, and forensic specialists to respond to the incident. We work with you to identify, contain, eradicate, and recover from the breach and communicate with you and your stakeholders every step of the way.

Pondurance’s IR approach combines our industry-leading MDR platform with our experienced team of threat hunters to provide:

Identification – Identify and detect an incident as soon as possible.

Containment – Stop the incident and reduce impact.

Eradication – Eliminate the threat and prevent recurrence.

Recovery – Return to normal operations and conduct a post-breach investigation.

Pondurance delivers IR services and guides organizations every step of the way. Learn more about IR planning in our eBook Incident Response Planning. 

Sources

*Computer Security Incident Handling Guide, NIST, August, 2012.  

**Cost of a Data Breach Report 2021, IBM, 2021.