Steps Business Should Follow For Effective Incident Response Plan

Incident Response is a structured methodology for handling security incidents, breaches, and cyber threats. A well-defined security incident response plan enables you to effectively identify, minimize the damage, and reduce the cost of the cyber-attack while finding ways & fixing the cause to prevent future attacks.

These are steps that should be considered by businesses to ensure that their security incident response plan is effective:

The first logical step during any cyber-attack is to find out the kind of attack it is. This can typically be identified through the monitoring of

IT systems, employment of cyber intelligence & looking back through log alerts.

Once the cyberattack has been identified, then you need to evaluate the potential damage it has caused to your business. Check if any assets that have been stolen assess whether any of your data has been seized and figure out the timescale of the attack as well.

It’s vital to ensure that all the employees are made fully aware of the attack at this point. As part of the security incident response plan, there should be a clear communication encompassing various physical & virtual mediums and providing employees clear instructions on what they need to do following the attack.

Now that your business has a good understanding of the Incident, all the evidence must be collated and kept for reference, as this could be useful in the days or months following the attack. Also, contacts must be made with the relevant authorities to ensure that they’re aware.

Once the nature & severity of the cyber-attack is completely clear, businesses should start the remediation process. This step should be carried out on a case-by-case basis; however, the basic steps involve resetting of the passwords and strengthening of the IT infrastructure security measures.

Once the threats have been addressed and business operations are back to normal, businesses then need to look back at their security incident response plan and see where they can make the improvements. Sometimes the best way of learning is by making mistakes.

Therefore, businesses need to understand that only creating the strategy isn’t important; you also need to make a long-term commitment to ensure that it’s maintained & implemented correctly. As there’s no point putting all the hard work in if it just sits neglected in a drawer. Hence, a business must conduct regular reviews of its security incident response plan to ensure it covers all the eventualities