An incident response team plays a crucial role in helping organizations respond to and recover from security incidents like data breaches, malware infections, and cyber attacks. Their services aim to quickly detect, analyze, and contain incidents while minimizing the impact on business operations.
Incident Detection
One of the primary responsibilities of the incident response team is to monitor networks, endpoints, servers, security tools, and other assets to detect potential incidents. This involves setting up intrusion detection systems, security information and event management (SIEM) solutions, firewalls, and other systems to analyze traffic and system logs for anomalies and threats.
Once a potential incident is detected, the team investigates to confirm whether an incident has occurred and gathers information like the affected assets, time of compromise, attack vectors, and more. Speed is critical during incident detection to stop attacks before they result in data theft or destruction.
Initial Investigation and Containment
After detecting and confirming an incident, the incident response team starts an initial investigation to determine the scope, impact, and root cause. This involves collecting and preserving evidence from affected systems like memory dumps, network traffic captures, log files, and disk images.
The team uses this information to contain the incident to prevent further damage. Containment strategies can include disconnecting affected systems from the network, blocking suspicious IP addresses in firewalls, taking compromised systems offline, disabling user accounts, and suspending access to data and resources until the issue is resolved.
Threat Intelligence Analysis
Threat intelligence analysis is another vital incident response service. The team analyzes threat data from the compromised environment as well as external intelligence feeds. This provides insights into the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by attackers.
By studying threat actor behaviors, the team can better understand their capabilities, targets, and motivations. This intelligence strengthens defenses by enabling the implementation of analytics and controls tailored to detect similar attacks.
Root Cause Analysis
Determining the root cause of an incident helps prevent similar events in the future. The incident response team performs a forensic investigation, reviewing evidence to reconstruct the attack sequence and identify vulnerabilities or misconfigurations exploited. This analysis uncovers where and how attackers gained access and how they moved laterally through the network.
Common root causes can include phishing emails, unpatched software, misconfigured cloud resources, weak passwords, and inadequate network segmentation. Pinpointing root causes leads to implementing targeted remediation activities.
Remediation
Remediation involves taking steps to eliminate the threat from compromised systems and repair damage from incidents. The incident response team coordinates the removal of malware, restoration of data from backups, patching of software, tightening of system configurations, resetting of account credentials, and overall hardening of security controls.
Effective remediation reduces vulnerabilities and blocks attacker access paths to prevent incident recurrence. It may also involve activities like revoking compromised digital certificates, resetting DNS records altered by attackers, and strengthening spam filters after phishing attacks.
Malware Analysis
When incidents involve malware or ransomware, the incident response team performs analysis to understand how it works and how to mitigate it. Malware analysis uncovers its capabilities, behaviors, and weaknesses.
Analysis may involve reverse engineering malware code, observing its execution in sandboxes, and examining network traffic patterns. This supports cleaning efforts and strengthening defenses against similar threats.
Evidence Preservation
Proper evidence preservation is critical during investigations. The team follows forensic best practices to collect, document, and secure evidence from affected systems to support recovery and strengthen incident reporting. Preserving evidence like system images and log files creates a comprehensive record of the incident.
Stringent evidence handling procedures preserve chain of custody and ensure evidence integrity. This provides support for potential legal action or law enforcement investigations against threat actors.
Incident Reporting
The incident response team maintains meticulous documentation throughout the investigation, including comprehensive incident reports. Reports detail the situation overview, findings, impacts, timeline, mitigations, and follow-up actions for each incident.
Thorough reporting keeps internal stakeholders and technology partners informed. It also supports compliance with regulatory incident notification requirements. The team provides reports to management and boards to demonstrate security program effectiveness.
Incident Monitoring
Even after initial containment, the team continues monitoring to ensure the incident is fully resolved. They scan for remnants of threats like dormant malware. Ongoing monitoring verifies that hardening activities successfully eliminated vulnerabilities.
The team also monitors for signs of continued attacker activity and secondary infections. Lasting vigilance is essential to confirm attackers do not regain access once remediation is complete. The team keeps issues open until they can declare the incident fully resolved.
Forensic Artifact Analysis
Forensic artifact analysis involves thoroughly studying system artifacts left behind by attackers. This provides insights unattainable from monitoring logs alone. The team examines forensic artifacts like processes, registry keys, files, and network connections.
In-depth analysis of forensic evidence reveals valuable timelines, behaviors, malware capabilities, account activities, and other incident details. All these clues help complete the attack reconstruction and confirm remediation steps addressed the root cause.
Threat Hunting
Proactive threat hunting helps identify security incidents that evade existing controls. The team leverages threat intelligence, heuristics, and data analytics to search through systems and uncover subtle footprints of advanced threats.
These threat hunting expeditions enable the team to detect attacks in earlier stages before extensive damage occurs. Early discovery allows rapid containment to limit impact and avoid incidents escalating into full-blown breaches.
Strategic Advice
Throughout incident response activities, the team also provides strategic advice to security leaders and executives. They recommend security enhancements to address vulnerabilities and gaps highlighted by incidents.
The team advocates for initiatives like stronger identity and access controls, added network monitoring capabilities, employee security training, and more robust business continuity plans. Their experience responding to incidents offers unique insights to strengthen resilience.
Education and Awareness
Incident responders help educate employees on security best practices through awareness initiatives. They provide guidance on topics like secure password usage, detecting phishing attempts, using encryption, and reporting suspicious activity.
Ongoing education and awareness campaigns create a stronger human firewall by reducing risky user behaviors that threat actors exploit. This complements the technical controls the team implements.
Third-Party Coordination
Large-scale incidents often require expertise and capabilities beyond the internal team. The team coordinates response efforts with third-parties like forensic investigators, public relations firms, crisis management services, and law enforcement.
They facilitate evidence gathering, communications, legal reporting, and other incident response activities across these external teams. Aligning efforts enhances the speed, effectiveness, and consistency of multi-party response.
Simulation Exercises
The team routinely conducts incidence response simulation exercises to validate plans, procedures, and readiness. These table-top exercises or full operational drills incorporate hypothetical scenarios.
Simulations train team members, identify areas for improvement, and gather executive feedback. Repeated practice strengthens the team’s rapid response capabilities and crisis management skills when real major incidents strike.
Post-incident Review
Each incident provides learning opportunities to enhance response capabilities. The team conducts comprehensive reviews examining the strengths and weaknesses of their performance. This identifies areas to improve processes, tools, skills, and plans.
The team integrates these lessons into updated response playbooks, enhanced training, and new readiness activities. Continuous improvement driven by past incidents prepares the team to handle the next event even more effectively.
Conclusion
Incident response teams provide a wide array of critical services to detect, contain, eradicate, and recover from security compromises. Their specialized expertise in threat analysis, digital forensics, malware triage, system hardening, and technical investigations accelerates response and drives improvements.
Mature incident response capabilities require significant investments in personnel, processes, and technologies. However, these investments pay dividends by enabling rapid containment, minimizing business disruption, learning from past incidents, and complying with breach notification regulations.
Organizations must empower and fund incident response teams to develop capabilities matching the advanced threat landscape. With cyber risks growing, an expert incident response function is essential to respond effectively when incidents evade preventive controls.