How Good Is Your Current Cyber Risk Response Plan?
Well, it’s no use denying the obvious. Cybercriminals – or using a milder word – hackers, are winning it huge against businesses and their ineffective response plans. And they are not stopping at any organization – whether big or small, these hackers have found sophisticated technology to invade businesses of all sizes across all industry sectors.
These frequent, more powerful, ever-evolving, and attacks of dire consequences are a result of the seismic shift in technology. On top of that, it is also essential to acknowledge that cyber incidents had been relegated to the IT department for too long. It’s high time that you, being business leaders and industry experts, evolve your perceptions around cybersecurity and critically analyze your current cyber risk response (before you too have to spend $100 million on investigation and direct remediation activities.)
What Is An Incident Response Plan & Why Do You Need One?
To begin with, incident response is a whole-of-business matter. A global company, after having suffered a massive breach, had to spend a whopping $100 million on investigating the attack and remedying the damage - because they lacked an incident response plan. But this cost was nothing compared to the multi-billion-dollar loss in market capitalization that they endured after this data breach.
India has been facing various kinds of breaches since the pandemic took its toll. From Air India, Upstox to Juspay, the country has been terrorized by data theft for a long time. One largest scale incident happened with T-Mobile company in Germany where?53 million?personal records of current, former, and prospective customers were leaked. Six months later, the company is yet facing all the consequences.?
Put simply, therefore, a cyber incident response plan is a written set of guidelines and instructions that prepares your agile team for identifying, responding to, and recovering from a cyberattack. It should not only address technology-related issues but also encompass other departments such as HR, finance, Customer Service, and more.
You Need A Response Plan Because Attacks Are Not Of One Type
That’s right; in addition to having a dedicated cybersecurity team spearheading various security services, an incident response plan is mandatory. It ensures your reaction to breaches is swift, organized, and as powerful as the attack. Since there are quite a few ways hackers can tap into your confidential data, it’s wiser to map out more than one response scenarios that ideally cover myriad types of cyberattacks.
A few attacks where an incident response is needed include;
A smart way to optimize your response plan is to include all types of cybersecurity risks that your business is vulnerable to. If you include all of these in your response plan, you secure a better position to respond, defend, and mitigate the risk of further damage.
Finding How Effective Your CSIRP IS: A Roundup?
Unless you know exactly what an optimum cybersecurity incident response plan is, you wouldn’t be able to judge the effectiveness of your current program. A cyber threat only becomes an incident when it becomes public, and until that happens, your organization has suffered irrevocable damage.?
Modern-day incident response requires you to carry out a knee-jerk reaction to the crisis. The more a company strategically ‘battle-tests’ security incidents before they happen, the more they can make their CSIRP optimized, and a muscle memory that can be called again and again.?
3 Major Shortfalls of most CSIRPs
The biggest shortfall of any incident response plan within an organization is its speed, or a lack thereof. The time taken by any business to identify a potential breach, contain the damage, and communicate the message to the organization and public determines how good your CSIRP is, as well as how good your brand is.
Another major shortfall is generic documentation that is mostly outdated. In the event of a breach, this document does not guide for useful and specific activity against the crisis.?
Third, even if the plan is super-customized, it is not integrated across the business units. Although this response plan can be effective against targeted attacks, it is incompetent to manage the incident across the whole business.
What to do?
It’s understood that cyber threats, and if matured, data breaches are an integral part of the modern-day landscape. To conceive an effective CSIRP, you must undertake the following four-step approach:?
The first step is understanding the current environment by analyzing your business continuity and disaster recovery plans. Interview role players across different departments and document everything.
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Use it to categorize information assets, vulnerabilities, and potential threats. After gaining a basic understanding of your business’s current environment, assess the effectiveness of previous response efforts.?
Next comes the identification of critical information assets. These are important to take data-specific actions.
Without identifying the criticality of these assets, you wouldn’t be able to acknowledge the cyber risks involved for each. A clear analysis of the business impact of these assets is compromised along with what response is required must be carried out.?
Creating the plan is the next phase of the process. Companies should involve people, either within the organization or third-party providers, who will own and maintain the IR documentation.
Anzen Technologies is a group of cybersecurity experts who specialize in Breach Response and Threat Management. At Anzen, we aid businesses in eradicating their cyber-risks as well as provide them with lasting progress.
Once the plan is put on paper, the more critical step is moving it to the fabric of the organization. Beyond communication and comprehensive change management, developing the IR plan into muscle memory by regular training and practice is important.
Finally, after you have developed an effective version of the IR plan that’s been conceived taking business environment and potential risks against different forms of attack under consideration, you come to the final step. This phase is post-incident when the crisis has been stopped, security is updated, and the organization is brought on track.?
No matter how effective you think your CSIRP is, you should always reflect on what has happened, assess the severity of the damage, and revisit your current program. Repetitive optimization can take your IR plan to the apex of its strength, such that no matter how evolved or advanced the threat is, your IR plan can take it down!
Key Benefits Of Putting Up An IR Plan In Place
An effective incident-response plan has numerous benefits, but three major ones include;
Your organization can quickly respond to the incident if the IR plan is strong. For example, if you’re an insurance company and a malicious code has infected an application; you can respond rapidly and maybe shut down the entire network access.?
2. Improved internal coordination
Better internal coordination allows the business to react with agility to the incident. When all departments are on the same page, the response automatically takes on the lightning speed with increased unity and cohesion.?
3. Limitation to damages
While data breaches have become common, successful organizations know how to ensure that minor plans do not escalate into major incidents.
For example, the team responsible for monitoring a company’s malware detected a malicious code attempting to access highly strategic data. The damage, therefore, was stopped altogether before it could actually take place.
Final Notes
The recent cyber breaches in India and beyond are rightly propelling IR to move higher on the executive agenda. If you’re looking to level up the game of your cybersecurity incident response, Anzen is at your service. Connect with one of our representatives today to deploy an effective-from-scratch Incident-Response plan that ensures you enjoy premium security from threats and sneaking malware for several years down the line. Let’s talk!
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