Building an Effective Incident Response Team for Cybersecurity Incidents

Preparing for cybersecurity incidents: Building an effective incident response team

Cybersecurity incidents happen in business, and the only thing you can do about it is to prepare for when an incident occurs. You need two things to fully prepare for eventual incidents: a cyber incident response team and an IR process. The IR team is responsible for all IR activities across an organization. An effective cybersecurity incident response team is collaborative and comprehensive. Collaborative means that all the team members work together and advocate for the IR process. Comprehensive means the team has cross-functional representation within the organization to ensure each aspect of the incident can be addressed.

Key roles in an incident response team

Incident response teams are crucial for managing and mitigating security incidents effectively. At a minimum, your incident response team members should include the following:

Having a variety of professionals with specific expertise in different incident response team roles is essential for effectively managing all aspects of an incident.

Incident Response (IR) Lead

The IR Lead oversees the incident response plan, prioritizes certain activities, and ensures the IR process is followed. The IR Lead is also responsible for leading the incident response effort, ensuring effective communication and documentation within the team, and acting as the primary communicator to internal stakeholders.

Legal

The legal team can be internal or outside (or a combination of the two). Either way, ensure you have access to legal representation with formal documentation describing incident response procedures.

Technical

For most incidents, the technical team means members of the IT staff, whose technical expertise is crucial for effective incident response. As most incidents involve data and/or IT infrastructure, the IT staff is in the best position to isolate and recover affected systems quickly.

Executive 

The executive team must be kept up to date, and they are also necessary for timely approving incident management, including funding, staffing, and time commitments.

Public Relations (PR)

The PR team communicates with external stakeholders and the press. It is essential that their messaging be honest, accurate, timely, and consistent.

Seven steps of an effective incident response process

Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) can come from any discipline but almost always include security analysts. These are experts who can identify when and how an incident occurred. They are also responsible for triage and forensics. Incident response activities, such as SIEM monitoring, threat detection, and containment, play a crucial role in this process. After building your incident response team, you will need to do some pre-incident response planning and have a good IR process which will include the following seven steps and the use of incident response tools:

Step 1 – Detection

Detection begins with event management, typically using a SIEM application. Frequently an incident will be triggered by an alert from the SIEM, with an incident ticket created soon after that documenting initial findings and classifying its criticality.

A Security Operations Center (SOC) plays a crucial role in this step by continuously monitoring, analyzing, and protecting the organization from cyber attacks, with threat hunters and analysts focusing on system security incident response.

Step 2 – Analysis

In this step, you’ll deploy your SMEs and the IT staff to collect data using tools and systems for further analysis, including endpoint analysis, binary analysis, or enterprise hunting in the event of a security incident. All forensic efforts should follow procedures documented ahead of time in run books.

Step 3 – Containment

Like analysis, containment should follow procedures documented in advance in run books. The procedures should include things like coordinated shutdowns. SMEs and IT staff are very active in ensuring security incidents are contained.

Step 4 – Eradication

Once the security breach is contained, it needs to be eradicated. This will be done by the same teams who were active in step 3. The goal here is to remove any traces of the incident from your systems and networks.

Step 5 – Recovery

The goal here is to restore normal business operations. How long varies depending on the severity of the incident. This is where you will take advantage of incident response services.

Step 6 – Communications

The computer incident response team is the focal point for this step, requiring strong communication skills to ensure timely and accurate dissemination of information to the appropriate stakeholders. Communications must be treated as confidential at this stage.

Step 7 – Post mortem/lessons learned

Everything about the incident must be documented in the Incident Report. From there, the SMEs and IT staff should conduct root cause analysis, identify preventative measures, document lessons learned and continue to monitor the situation. Different types of security incident response teams, such as Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) and Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), play a crucial role in the post-mortem and lessons learned step by providing specialized expertise and ensuring comprehensive documentation.

Prepare for cyber incidents before they strike: get expert help from Cyber Defense Group!

Don’t wait for a cyber incident to occur to establish an incident response team and process. The success of your response largely depends on the preparation you’ve made beforehand. But what if your organization lacks the expertise needed to quickly and effectively respond? That’s where Cyber Defense Group comes in. They’ve assisted over 300 companies, like yours, in minimizing damage from incidents. Contact us now to ensure you have the right subject matter experts at your disposal!