Smart IT Alerting Improves Effective Cyber Attack Incident Response

 

IT Alerts andIncident response is complex involving multiple moving parts. Businesses are leveraging smart tools to maximize the effectiveness of IT incident response  and prevent cyberattacks as well as quickly restore them when an incident occurs. 

Planning your incident response process can ensure an immediate and organized response, avoiding many unnecessary business impacts as well as reputational damage. Every second counts when it comes to cybersecurity. In every organization, an incident response team should be trained to respond quickly. 

Once a cybersecurity incident has been confirmed by security experts, it is critical to notify relevant team members and stakeholders as soon as possible. Under privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA, public notification of a data breach is required.

 It is advisable to involve legal, press, and executive management depending on the severity of the breach. Based on the nature and severity of the breach, your incident response plan should identify who needs to be informed. It is common for other departments such as customer service, finance, or IT to need to take immediate action. 

Drive right actions 

It's crucial to have the right team, with the right skills, along with the required tribal knowledge. This will help you drive the overall responsibility of incident response. Ensure a direct line of communication and smart alerts that efficiently supports the team members to take the right actions. You should consider involving other relevant areas of the company, such as corporate communications and HR, when it comes to the more serious incidents. 

Your Security Incident Response Team is already built, but now is the time to activate the team with skilled professionals and intuitive technologies. Legal notification and remediation should be notified immediately if an incident could result in litigation or public disclosure. 

Centralized alerts & Monitoring 

Employ centralized alerts & monitoring tools for efficiency. To better detect and investigate alerts and activities, security analysts need immediate and comprehensive visibility into those indicators aligned under the incident response plan.  In addition to network-based telemetry, analysts are required to have access to logs from basic infrastructure, security systems, and applications.

 Furthermore, emphasize an integrated platform that enables incident management, investigation, alerts, and detection. A comprehensive network packet-level monitoring program, covering all internet exit points and all key networks within the company.

 Moreover, the tool will let you have a comprehensive log/event collection system that integrates with network visibility. Zapoj can help with continuously updated compromise reports and threat intelligence feeds to speed up the investigation and detection of threats. 

Reach the right people 

Reaching the right people on time increases productivity and will also minimize the losses during the incident. Assigning specific roles to an incident response team member may eliminate confusion, inconsistency in priorities and process, and, in the worst case, complacency.

 

It is important to clearly define each role and responsibility. Analysis, security data, incidents, and security devices should be treated differently. A company's incident response teams should be deployed quickly by deploying expert and tiered staff that is flexible enough to resolve the issue and restore services.

 Proactive Detection

 

The security posture of an organization gradually improves with effective incident response. To achieve this, it is essential to record the entire incident response during the investigation and afterward. 

The information is intended to help the company improve its systems and processes for investigating, detecting, and reducing future incidents. It should cover metrics such as incident response and detection times. It should also indicate the overall effectiveness of existing countermeasures.

 An organization can determine whether it is allocating enough funds to security issues by monitoring this. As a result of an incident management system, it is possible to determine the root cause of the problem, set realistic goals, learn from previous mistakes, and determine whether progress is being made. 

More mature organizations document use cases that describe specific threat scenarios and how they respond to them in their business environment. In this way, the rest of the team can learn from past incidents and enhance their response.

 

Automated Incident Response 

Detecting and responding to security threats and incidents requires little to no human intervention. Automated incident response is also designed to promote around-the-clock defense. 

Automation plays a major role in detecting threats and responding to them in real-time. The majority of cyberattacks, for instance, start with a malicious email and are followed by an automated incident response system. Despite these alerts and threats, they can effectively be handled without human intervention. By automating malware analysis and tracking processes, analysts no longer need to go through hundreds of alerts each day. 

Yet most organizations are still in the early stages of automating their IR processes. Identifying what to automate in security operations requires first codifying manual IR processes into playbooks. This creates more consistency and efficiency, resulting in repeatable and predictable workflows. 

Advanced analytics for Incident response tracking 

Most businesses track security incidents manually or with a decentralized system. This usually consists of spreadsheets updated by individual analysts. In addition to this, some analysts are more diligent or skilled than others regarding these updates, making it difficult to effectively track how occurrences are being handled, provide governance, and determine if the procedure is improving over time. 

To improve incident response procedures, a system should be easily customizable to allow for alert collection, incident escalation, incident creation, resolving, analyzing, and containing incidents. Zapoj's incident response will work together with other security platforms to automatically create tickets based on the alerts they receive. This platform allows the business to amend the priority ratings established on new information about vulnerabilities and risks.

 Conclusion 

Even though cyber-attacks often seem inevitable, it is recommended that organizations keep an incident response plan. Zapoj's IT incident response will provide your company with an integrated approach for improved communications and a more reliable cyberattacks response.

 

The platform prevents incidents before they occur, with smart IT alerting which saves you time and money. Designed with strong domain expertise and years of experience, we are catering businesses to gain visibility into potential threats to critical systems. Contact us today or get a demo!