With the increasing rates of cyber attacks on global businesses, the importance of implementing incident response steps and processes to secure systems has risen significantly. Cybersecurity is one of the key services that businesses require to stay afloat in the 3rd decade of the 21st century.
In the first half of 2020 alone, the number of cyber-attacks increased by a whopping 600%. For businesses, this is a noteworthy statistic as they have large amounts of data stored in their systems.
In the case of a breach, the risk to this information stands at a high level. However, the inevitability of these attacks is why most organizations have a cybersecurity incident response plan as part of their cybersecurity processes.
Needless to say, a business requires a robust cybersecurity incident response plan in order to prevent leaks and breaches. In addition, they also need to update their plan to stay safe in cyberspace.
To start with, here are the 6 phases of an effective cybersecurity incident response plan.
The 6 Phases of Cybersecurity Incident Response Plan
Below are the phases of incident management that companies should implement in order to ensure overall security from cyber attacks.
1. Preparing
Preparation is always the first step. As an organization, you will need to accept that there is a looming possibility of a cybersecurity event on the horizon. Align your policies to information sharing, data protection, and network security with your existing infrastructure. Educate your employees about cybersecurity so that they can identify assets and benefit from the incident response plan.
2. Identifying
Identification, as the name suggests, is all about the discovery of a breach. It is the step where you identify if you have been breached or if any of your data has been compromised. If yes, then you will need to further identify the extent, the effect, and the source of the breach.
3. Containment
In this phase of incident response, you throw everything at the problem in order to contain it and mitigate the risks it poses to the organization after an attack has happened. You need to figure out how to contain the effects by considering what systems can be made offline and what can be deleted. Use this phase to derive the long-term and short effects of the attack.
4. Elimination/Solution
This is where you will be addressing the source of the breach and dealing with it in time to avoid being exploited again. This means releasing new patches, removing malicious software, and updating old systems. This cyber incident recovery step helps you clear out any potential risks and start over without compromising any valuable data.
5. Recovering
Recovering is both, coming back from the attack and getting the systems back online after an incident. Needless to say, the recovery part comes after you have patched everything up. This step is all about testing, monitoring, and verifying the changes in the system. Skipping this part may prove to be disastrous.
6. Learning Lessons and Optimizing
While everything else will help you get back up and running after an attack, the last phase of the 6 phases of the incident response plan is about future-proofing your business. Take your learning from this incident and make sure that you are safe in the future.
Your incident response plan for cybersecurity is a blueprint for your organization to fight back in the event of an attack. It needs to be thorough and detailed in order to provide the team with the right steps and the correct guidelines. As a leading managed service provider for cybersecurity, SVAM International is adept in cyber security incident handling with all the latest tools and techniques to safeguard your systems from the looming threat of cyber attacks.