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Best Practices for Incident Response Services: How To Investigate and Report Breaches

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Reports of cybersecurity incidents are an almost daily occurrence in today’s media, with even the largest companies not immune from a data breach — despite all the resources they have to try and prevent them.

Instant response services in cybersecurity are now more important than ever as threats continue to grow and evolve. A comprehensive Incident Response Plan (IRP) can help you manage and mitigate any breaches that may occur, and minimise the damage to your systems and your organisational reputation.

We’re going to walk you through the steps you should take from the very moment a breach is discovered, eight up until you have everything restored and functional once again.

Legal Counsel and Response Activation

When a breach is identified, legal counsel should be contacted immediately. They should help your organisation actively navigate the immediate fallout to avoid any further legal or regulatory pitfalls while addressing the breach. Your legal counsel will also help with drafting and timing the release of communications to affected parties and regulators while also playing a crucial role in preserving evidence in a manner that’s admissible in court if needed in the future.

At the same time, you should also activate your incident response team. This team — ideally working to a predefined response plan — can manage the technical aspects of the breach and liaise consistently with your legal counsel to ensure all actions align with legal requirements.

Keeping Affected Endpoints Online

When a breach occurs, your instinct may be to completely shut down any affected systems in a bid to prevent the spread of damage. However, this can destroy valuable evidence that could have been used to understand and even mitigate the breach. Preserving this data and evidence is key, and to do this you’ll need to keep compromised systems online.

We recommend that you follow these steps to safely keep these systems online and preserve any relevant data:

  1. Isolation – isolate compromised systems from the network to prevent further unauthorised access.
  2. Monitoring – Closely monitor these systems for signs of ongoing malicious activity.
  3. Forensic imaging – where possible, create a forensic image of affected systems that will allow you to preserve evidence while still allowing you to take the system offline for repair and recovery.

Disconnecting and Quarantining Systems

Once a cybersecurity incident has been detected, you need to work to minimise and control any potential spread. Isolation stops the lateral movement of threats across your network and helps preserve any evidence that may be useful.

Look to:

  • Physically disconnect any Ethernet connections to prevent ongoing data exfiltration or malware spread.
  • Disable wireless connectivity to sever the connection to any potential threats.
  • Use automatically configured Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS) to isolate systems that exhibit suspicious behaviour.
  • Employ a network segmentation strategy to prevent the wide-scale spread of a threat throughout your entire network.
  • Create quarantine zones within your network to allow for the controlled observation of compromised systems.

Identifying and Preserving Evidence

We’ve discussed the importance of identifying and preserving evidence from a legal standpoint, but let’s examine some strategies you can use to do this.

Log files are the first places to look. They can provide timestamps, IP addresses, user activity and more — all giving you information on the methods used to breach your systems.

Endpoints such as laptops and mobile devices can contain evidence of initial compromise including malware payloads. Network devices should also be examined here to discover any traffic anomalies that could unearth unauthorised access or exfiltration attempts.

Finding and preserving this evidence through forensic copies should be your next port of call to support further forensic analysis and any potential legal proceedings.

Restoring Network Functionality and Building Resilience

After the breach has been contained, you can shift your focus to recovery. You should look to gradually restore network functionality while still prioritising security enhancements. Invest in continuous monitoring in case there is any lingering threat, and build in additional feedback loops in your systems to provide further resilience in the future.

Reconstructing the Attack

To better understand how your vulnerabilities were exploited, it’s essential to reconstruct the attack. This will allow you to find the initial point of compromise and help you secure endpoints against future threats.

Start by gathering all of your log data from every device and system. A SOC team can help analyse this data to identify any patterns and anomalies. Use this data to find the key events, such as the first indication of compromise or any data exfiltration attempts. Finally, plot these events on an incident timeline to better understand the attackers’ methods and objectives.

Restoring Trust and Rebuilding Reputation

While your focus has likely been solely on the technical recovery and mitigating any damage there, an incident also brings with it a need to try and restore your organisation’s trustworthiness and overall reputation.

Effective communication with all stakeholders is essential to this. Acknowledge the brief as soon as it’s safe to do so, providing as much detail as possible. Give regular updates as the situation develops to keep stakeholders in the loop, going as far as communicating ongoing efforts if there is no new information. When doing this, ensure you use clear and accessible language so as not to overwhelm what could well be a non-technical audience.

Making use of an outsourced SOC service can contribute significantly to the restoration of trust. It demonstrates your dedication to cybersecurity, increases your rapid response capabilities, and shows stakeholders that you’re engaged in the practice of continuous improvement.

Preventing The Next Breach

Preventing any breach requires your organisation to be proactive as opposed to reactive. Your best practices need to encompass technology, processes, and people to build a resilient cybersecurity posture.

You need to regularly train and upskill your staff, conduct thorough and ongoing threat assessments, and engage in proactive monitoring and threat hunting to identify and neutralise threats before they can even impact your operations.

When it comes to incident response services in cybersecurity, having a robust plan in place is essential. You need to communicate quickly and efficiently with your legal and incident response teams upon discovery of a breach and work to isolate and quarantine affected systems to prevent the spread of malicious agents while still preserving any data or evidence.

Following this, slowly restoring your systems while analysing and preserving data related to the breach is imperative, while always ensuring that you’re working to rebuild trust within your organisation.

A dedicated SOC service can aid with all of this, but DigitalXRAID can also provide help with a customised security strategy, general testing, and incident response. Get in touch today to see exactly how we can help protect your organisation in the future.

Protect Your Business & Your Reputation.

With a continued focus on security, you can rest assured that breaches and exploits won't be holding you back.

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