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Incident response policies enable organizations to plan and codify their response to information security incidents. These policies typically include how the incident response team is made up and the roles of individual members, how to implement the policy, tools used to respond to incidents and recover from security breaches, and who is in charge of verifying that the policy is successfully enforced.
In this article, you will learn:
An incident response policy should cover at least the following six phases:
Related content: read our guide to incident response process
The following tips will help you define a more effective incident response policy.
Incident response policies should be regularly revised to keep up with new cybersecurity technologies and techniques, and new threats facing the organization. The document should be general enough to cover all types of incidents the organization is likely to face. When a specific type of incident occurs, lessons learned from it should be added to the relevant part of the policy.
Successful creation and implementation of incident response strategies requires close collaboration between departments. Responding to large scale incidents, especially those with financial consequences, requires the involvement of legal teams, public relations, human relations, customer support, senior management, and more.
All relevant stakeholders—both internal and external—should participate in incident response policy planning. By allowing all stakeholders a say in the planning of the policy, you are more likely to capture the relevant steps to take in a real event, and ensure closer cooperation with stakeholders when a breach occurs.
Related content: read our guide to building an incident response team
Use the following metrics to monitor the performance of your organization’s incident response team:
An incident response plan sets up procedures to ensure early identification of incidents, and timely response, to prevent data breaches that can result in service outages, loss or theft of data, unauthorized access, or other damage.
Plans cannot be effective without dedicating personnel to execute them. In larger organizations, a dedicated Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT) is set up, composed mainly of security staff and IT staff trained on the relevant skills. In smaller organizations, an incident response team can be assembled using part-time contribution from employees in other roles, often complemented by outsourced incident response vendors.
The response team is at the focus of an incident and communicates their findings, activities, and conclusions to legal, law and press agencies, other concerned stakeholders, and affected customers.
An incident response service can assist an organization in detecting, responding, and mitigating cybersecurity threats. In its basic form, service providers are paid a retainer or per-incident fee, and respond to high-profile breaches within a timeframe dictated by a Service Level Agreement (SLA).
Incident response services can also address ongoing minor incidents, remove ransomware, malware, and the like, and hunt for existing or potential threats or vulnerabilities. Most providers follow through with post-breach investigations.
Incident Response Automation
Cynet provides a holistic solution for cybersecurity, including Cynet Response Orchestration which can automate your incident response policy. Users can define automated playbooks, with pre-set or custom remediation actions for multiple attack scenarios.
Cynet Response Orchestration can address any threat that involves infected endpoints, malicious processes or files, attacker-controlled network traffic, or compromised user accounts.
Learn more about Cynet Response Orchestration
Incident Response Services
Cynet provides Incident Response (IR) services that add deep security experience to its world-class incident response platform. Cynet’s proactive 24/7 security team acts as your extended team, identifying incidents, leading any required analysis, and responding on your behalf. Our incident response services provide: