In the realm of cybersecurity, the preparation phase of an incident response plan lays the groundwork for effective handling of security breaches and cyber incidents. This phase centers on proactive measures and strategic planning to ensure readiness when incidents occur.
1. Building the Incident Response Team:
Incident Response Manager: Oversees the incident response process, coordinates actions, and manages the response team.
Security Analysts:
Triage Analyst: Identifies false positives, configures IDS/IPS, and monitors for ongoing intrusions.
Forensic Analyst: Extracts crucial information to understand the attack's nature and its origins.
Threat Researcher: Stays updated with the latest threats and attack patterns.
Cross-Functional Support: Involves HR, legal, management, public relations, and technical experts.
2. Documentation and Call List:
Incident Form: Records incident details including date, time, location, observers, incident type, scope, and description.
Call List: Predefined hierarchy for notification and escalation of incidents.
3. Data Criticality:
Prioritizing the handling of breaches involving sensitive data:
Personally Identifiable Information (PII)
Sensitive Personal Information (SPI)
Personal Health Information (PHI)
Financial Information
Intellectual Property : Information created by an organization, usually about the products.
Corporate Information: Confidential data owned by a company like product, sales, marketing, legal, and contract information.
High-Value Assets
4. Communication Plan:
Establishing secure communication channels and backup plans.
Utilizing various communication methods: email, web portals, phone calls, in-person updates, voicemail, formal reports.
5. Reporting Requirements:
Understanding the distinct types of breaches (e.g., data exfiltration, insider exfiltration, device theft/loss, accidental breaches, integrity breaches).
Complying with laws and regulations governing breach notifications to affected parties
6. Response Coordination:
An incident response will require coordination between different internal departments and external agencies.
Identifying key stakeholders within and outside the organization.
Involving senior leadership, regulatory bodies, legal, law enforcement, human resources, and public relations for effective coordination.
Senior Leadership:
Example: (your credit card server got affected so technically if you disconnect the server okay but if thinks logically it will affect payments and that will hurt your organization badly. You have to work this out with leadership that if you shutting down that system or server how will you receive payment until than so it will not affect your business) so senior leadership will be there
Regulatory bodies:
Governmental organizations that oversee the compliance with specific regulations and laws (like HIPAA, PCIDSS, GDPR)
Legal:
The business or organization’s legal counsel is responsible for mitigating risk from civil lawsuits
Law Enforcement:
May provide services to assist in your incident handling efforts or to prepare for legal action against the attacker in the future
Human Resources (HR):
Used to ensure no breaches of employment law or employee contracts is made during an incident response
Public Relations (PR):
(protect from negative publicity from a serious incident)
7. Training and Testing:
Conducting comprehensive training sessions for all relevant personnel.
Performing tabletop exercises and penetration tests to simulate real incident scenarios.
This preparation phase lays the groundwork for a robust incident response strategy, ensuring organizations are equipped with the necessary resources, teams, and plans to effectively respond to security incidents. Stay tuned for our upcoming series to delve deeper into the remaining phases of incident response.
Akash Patel
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