Ultimate Guide to Cyber Security Incident Management

Developing a cybersecurity incident response (IR) process must be treated as a living document. Security incident response plans change more frequently as the global threat landscape becomes more challenging. Hackers' adoption of adversarial artificial intelligence (AI) changes the threat landscape. AI empowers hackers by embellishing them with new capabilities, including near-perfect email phishing content, making malware faster, and increasing attack velocities.

Organizations already witnessing increased cyberattack events against their critical assets, including phishing attacks, ransomware attacks, and identity threats, recognize the need to revamp and continuously update their incident response and case management capabilities.

ForeNova, a globally managed security service provider (MSSP), understands the importance of creating a security operations (SecOps) team. SecOps requires critical investments in incident response tools, a proven process for responding to attacks and recruiting the best talent.

Is your cyber incident response plan up for a refresh? Contact the incident response experts at ForeNova today to discuss your current and future strategy!

What is Cybersecurity Incident Management?

Cybersecurity incident management involves detecting the threat, responding to the event, executing the proper remediation, establishing proper notification and reporting, and creating a workflow for closing the event within the case management system.

The cybersecurity incident management system must become a universal platform for suspicious activities across all platforms. It needs visibility into everything from the enterprise identity management system to firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, insider threats, endpoints, hosts, virtual machines, networks, cloud-based hosted applications, and personal devices, including mobile.

Importance of Incident Management in Cyber Security

Most complex cyber events happen across several attack surfaces within the enterprise network. A hacker could execute a denial-of-service (DoS) attack against the organization's cloud instances while attempting a Brute Force attack against the identity management system.

Having a centralized incident management system with visibility of these attacks helps the organization quickly disseminate if the cyber event is isolated or part of a larger kill chain.

Critical Components of an Effective Incident Management Plan

Incident management plans need proven adaptive controls and processes that leverage these tools to help identify, respond to, remediate, and report events.

Incident Detection and Identification

Network detection, host-based detection, endpoint detection, and application security detection are examples of tools that all organizations need to enable. Many of these tools now have artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) embedded within their products. AI and ML detection capabilities are critical for organizations facing adversarial AI attacks from hackers.

Proper identification and classification of the attacks help SecOps and IT Operations determine which remediation to apply to resolve the case. If the detection layer detects a denial-of-service (DoS) attack, the incident detection will notify the network security team to investigate further.

Accurate detection and identification are critical to ensuring cyber events are forwarded to various teams for follow-up. Reducing false positives and negatives is also essential for organizations to help reduce the unnecessary workloads placed on the SecOps and IT operations engineers.

Incident Response and Containment

After detecting the security event, the ability to respond and contain is critical in protecting the organization's assets. How an organization responds, including the ability to contain attacks like ransomware, is essential to ensuring the organization's systems' confidentiality, integrity, and availability (CIA).

Executing failed incident responses, such as accidentally blocking access to an application or resetting administrative passwords, can cause even more significant system-wide outages. Failing to contain a lateral-moving attack like ransomware also leads to more outstanding system-wide data breaches and outages.

Defining an effective incident response plan, including implementing security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) and other proactive measures, is critical. Automation embedded within incident response is crucial for SecOps to help with load management. Hackers using various AI tools can increase attack velocity to a much grander scale beyond the ability of human engineers to analyze every attack thread.

Incident Recovery and Remediation

One of the critical incident response steps is remediation and recovery. After the detection, classification, and identification of the attack event recorded within the incident management system, implementing SOAR functions becomes the next critical step. Within SOAR, patching, updating, operating systems, restarting services, or even removing the asset from the exposed network is an example of how this capability functions.

Post-Incident Analysis and Reporting

These incident management tools must help document the various roles of SecOps and IT Operations in the cyber resilience plan to ensure the proper resource teams address the security threat and report their actions within the same incident management system.

Post-incident analysis becomes far more efficient if the organization uses the same incident management system. Organizations will use a centralized system to complete their root-cause analysis (RCA) faster and more efficiently. Automated reporting and notification also become more efficient if the organization leverages the same incident management platform.

Best Practices for Cyber Security Incident Management

Organizations creating a flexible, agile, and fluid incident response policy and management strategy need to include the following:

• Develop an incident response plan that maximizes automation to help reduce the stress placed on SecOps and IT Operations engineers.
• Leverage industry incident response frameworks from NIST, ISO, ISACA, SAN, and Cloud Security Alliance. These frameworks have proven best practices for setting up incident response procedures and workflows.
• Ensure within the incident response, your team incorporates the six most common functions:
  • The preparation phase includes creating and upkeep playbooks, SOAR responses, and risk assessment engagements.
  • The detection phase must include the ability to detect and collect necessary artifacts for each security event.
  • Containment functionality, including leveraging network segmentation, helps prevent the propagation of attacks.
  • Eradication leveraging remediation capabilities ensures the actual root cause of the attack becomes removed and well-documented in the post-incident review report.
  • Develop and maintain incident response playbooks for the most common attacks, including malware, email phishing, identity theft, DoS attacks, and man-in-the-middle attacks.
  • Develop an incident response team with various resources from SecOps, IT Operations, application security, and network engineering.

Tools and Technologies for Incident Management

Selecting the proper incident management tools starts with the organization defining its success factors for incident management and response. Incident management tools vary, with some offering several layers of tools and workflows while others are particular to a particular framework.

Here are essential elements organizations consider when selecting an incident management platform:

• Usability: Is the tool far too complex for the in-house engineers to master? Is the document provided by the software manufacturer relevant and updated?
• User Interface (UI): Is the UI easy to navigate for non-tech users?
• Adaption: Does the incident management platform have connectivity options with other platforms through a secure API that includes asset management, patching solutions, and automation tools?
• Reliability: Does the incident management function under heavy loads?

Here is a breakdown of the top incident management tools available today. These tools align well with the critical elements within an incident management solution.

ServiceDesk

ServiceDesk Plus offers comprehensive tools for managing incidents, maintenance, and cross-platform support. However, you'll have to choose the more expensive pricing plans to access advanced features like ITIL. The wide array of services can be overwhelming for new users.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a significant incident management system software that connects various resources to help users solve incidents independently.

“Zendesk supports many integrations and channels, such as Zoom, Amazon Connect, and more. Its intuitive interface makes handling tickets from calls, emails, and chats easy.”

With its user-friendly interface and ticket management, this solution works well for medium—to small businesses but may not handle high daily incident volumes for larger firms.

BigPanda

“BigPanda uses machine learning to detect alerts, downtimes, or incidents across various data sources and pinpoint their origins instantly.”

Additionally, it excels at consolidating alerts from diverse systems into a single database and eliminating redundant entries for the same incident. It offers customization options with many integrations, such as Jira, Slack, and Amazon CloudTrail.

BigPanda saves money and speeds things up in IT with intelligent, alert grouping. However, incident management tools are pricey and might burn a hole in your pocket.

ServiceNow

“ServiceNow SecOps includes AI-powered platform capabilities so you can reduce costs while delivering frictionless customer service. Automate issue resolution and enable smart self-service. Empower agents with real-time information and intelligence.”

This solution supports automating support requests and creating SecOps workflows, but it may encounter challenges in organizing user requests, and some users might consider its pricing slightly high.

Case Study: Corporate Incident Management Platform

Automotive Supplier Transforms Cybersecurity with NovaMDR

The automotive supplier found themselves grappling with various cybersecurity issues that were hampering their operations. Their local security team was ill-equipped to handle overseas phishing email sample analysis and successful attack notifications from higher authorities. Their production environment was also populated with legacy OS-embedded machines, rendering installing traditional endpoint detection software impossible. This led to performance issues and a vulnerable network as various viruses wreaked havoc on their systems.

Customer Quote: “Before we started working with ForeNova, our security team was constantly overwhelmed by the number of threats and incidents they had to deal with. The NovaMDR solution has indeed been a game-changer for our organization.”

CTO of the automotive supplier

Building a Cybersecurity Incident Management Team

The first step in building a SecOps team is defining why you need one. Assessing the organization's current capabilities helps determine whether operational gaps may exist. Organizations need to evaluate the risk of these gaps compared to the reward of hiring SecOps engineers or outsourcing to an MSSP.

The second step in building a SecOps team is defining the various roles. The role definition should align with the processes defined within the incident response workflow. One role should be threat determination and classification. The second role should be incident threat analysis. This role determines what impact this attack will have on the organization. The third role is incident response engineer. This role either acts or monitors the various automation executions. The fourth role is the post-event engineer. This role focuses on closing the case, performing a root-cause analysis (RCA), and producing the report as a lesson learned.

The next step in building a SecOps focuses on what kind of engineers the organization should hire. The SecOps teams need a diverse group of talent with a common background in network security and incident response and expertise in one specific domain, including endpoint security, host-based security, or security automation.

Conclusion: Strengthening Your Cyber Security Posture

Preparing for the next zero-day attack starts with developing and nurturing SecOps functions and processes daily. Properly aligning resources with the correct cybersecurity protection architecture helps ensure the organization is moving further toward a more proactive incident response and management model and less reactive.

Organizations needing help keeping the talent and financial capital to build their own SecOps department to handle the increase in attack velocity should consider developing a relationship with MSSPs like ForeNova.

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