Cyber Incident Response Plan: From a Novelty to Essentiality!

By CIOReview | Wednesday, July 10, 2019

It is crucial to create a compelling and adaptable incident response plan that helps not only with surviving in the modern threat landscape but also for controlling IT security costs.

The need for a cybersecurity incident response plan is growing for enterprises of all size. No organization is exempt from cyber attacks and having a strategic plan of action that immediately executes a security breach is crucial to limit incident costs and damages to the company's reputation.

When a cybersecurity event appears, there are several indicators, from network alerts to application failures. Incident response plan should include a policy of communication with the appropriate parties, and the method of communications, along with a backup plan. Setting priorities for response based on the severity of the incident is a smart move as no two incidents require the same level of response or sense of urgency. Each new event should undergo a Security Level Assessment (SLA) with predefined time-to-response requirements, procedures, and documentation provided.

Additionally, members of the incident response team must have clearly-defined roles, and collective roles within an incident response team, which include firstly, an incident response analyst who spend time analyzing reports from various software platforms to distinguish between severe threats and false positives. Another role is of an information security engineer who has a more profound knowledge of common risks, log management, breach detection systems, and many others. This person is for designing tests to ensure the network can withstand threats and defend vulnerabilities.

An administrative coordinator should also be ready to couple the technical expertise of an information security engineer with the skills of a manager as well. This person is held responsible for leading the incident response team, coordinating efforts within the corporate structure, and serving as the subject expert for an incident response when reporting to board members.

Creating a plan ensures companies protect their intellectual property and customer data from being distributed, which would inflict significant damage to them.