The protection of sensitive data is very important for the growth and survival of organisations. In order to response quickly to breach of information, security incident management process must be set up to identify, manage, record and analyse security threats or incidents in real-time.
A proper security incident management process will provide a robust and comprehensive view of any security issues within an infrastructure. A security incident can be an attempted intrusion in the IT system, an unauthorised access to data, a policy violation or leak of information.
A strong security incident management process is also imperative for reducing recovery costs, potential liabilities, and damage to the victims of the incident. Organizations should evaluate and select tools to improve visibility and alert with regard to security incidents.
Here are 7 reasons you must have a strong security incident management process in place:
1. Prepares you for emergency—security incidents happen without warning, so it’s essential to prepare a process ahead of time
2. Repeatable process—without an incident response plan, teams cannot respond in a repeatable manner or prioritize their time
3. Coordination—in large organizations, it can be hard to keep everyone in the loop during a crisis. An incident response process can help achieve this
4. Exposes gaps—in mid-sized organizations with limited staff or limited technical maturity, an incident response plan exposes obvious gaps in the security process or tooling which can be addressed before a crisis occurs
5. Preserves critical knowledge—an incident response plan ensures critical knowledge and best practices for dealing with a crisis are not forgotten over time and lessons learned are incrementally added
6. Practice makes perfect—an incident response plan creates a clear, repeatable process that is followed in every incident, improving coordination and effectiveness of response over time
7. Documentation and accountability—an incident response plan with clear documentation reduces an organization’s liability—it allows you to demonstrate to compliance auditors or authorities what was done to prevent the breach
As cybersecurity threats continue to grow in volume and sophistication, organisations are adopting practices that allow them to rapidly identify, respond to, and mitigate these types of incidents while becoming more resilient and protecting against future incidents.
Security incident management utilises a combination of appliances, software systems, and human-driven investigation and analysis. Here below is a list of persons who should be involved in a security incident management process.
1. Incident response managers—have at least two members of staff responsible for approving the incident response plan and coordinating activity when an incident occurs.
2. Security analysts—review alerts, identify possible incidents and perform an initial investigation to understand the scope of an attack.
3. Threat researchers—responsible for providing contextual information around a threat, using information from the web, threat intelligence feeds, data from security tools, etc.
4. Other stakeholders—these can include senior management or board members, HR, PR, and senior security staff such as the Chief Information Security Office (CISO)
5. Third parties—such as lawyers, outsourced security services, or law enforcement agencies.
A security incident management process will of course differ from one organisation to another. It depends on the size of the organisation, on the budget allocated and of course on the resources available. However, all organisation should have a minimum level of security that we call the acceptable level of risk.
If you think that your organisation is at risks and you would like to have an assessment of your information security level, contact us to schedule a consultation.
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