The process of investigating, minimizing, and mitigating the impacts of a security problem is known as incident response. NIST defines incident response as “The mitigation of violations of security policies and recommended practices.” In order to assess the complexity of the incident, identify its source, and take action to stop it from happening again in the future, a team of security experts often participates in this process. The purpose of incident response is to return an organization to regular operations as soon as possible. Preparation, Identification, Containment, Eradication, Recovery, and Lessons learned are known six phases involved in incident response.
As part of incident response, SOC teams may undertake a variety of particular roles and responsibilities, such as:
- Actively monitoring security platforms and networks for indications of suspicious events
- Reviewing and evaluating security warnings to determine whether they are false positives or real threats
- Analyzing security alerts to assess the severity of incidents
- Minimizing the consequences of security incidents
- Cooperating with other teams to handle security-related problems
- Reporting to management and important stakeholders all security occurrences.
SOC teams are essential in creating an incident response plan, which describes the steps to take in the event of a security incident.
Incident Response Process
Create an incident response plan
Responding to an incident without a strategy results in avoidable damage and resource waste. The SOC is ready to respond to an event, recover from that, and manage its consequences when it has a well-thought-out, tested incident response plan. Plans for IR usually include actions for certain cases, such as communication standards, business continuity, and more. They also offer a structure of accountability, guidance, and control. Top-performing SOCs frequently do tabletop exercises with the rest of the company to test their plans and ensure everyone is prepared.
Assure quick access to all information
When IR methods apply thorough, contextualized investigation techniques are more effective. To identify an incident’s impact, maturing SOC teams need fast access to both historical and real-time data. Such tools provide quick, reliable responses to basic, flexible queries across all data sets as well as the visualization of sophisticated analyses. The final result is that analysts can quickly investigate incidents by correlating them with past data and constructing the whole threat scenario with data at scale.
Eliminate and defend against the threat
Computer security incident response teams (CSIRT) are engaged during an incident to stop attackers in their tracks. This can involve network isolation of compromised devices or password resets of the insider accounts. By taking over routine tasks like automating processes or creating best-fit security playbooks, security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) solutions may assist in reducing the amount of time required to take action. Case management is a crucial step in the incident response process that uses SOAR to automate data collection and preservation while maintaining the chain of custody for incident evidence.
Ensure long-term recovery and system regeneration.
Closing an attack vector is one thing; preventing a repeat offense is quite another. The IR team’s top priorities are returning the organization to a steady state and minimizing expensive downtime. After an incident, IR teams make efforts to fix vulnerabilities, improve incident response strategies, and implement preventative security measures. Organizations may also be responsible for alerting relevant parties, authorities, or law enforcement to secure evidence. Leading incident response methods involve completing a formal document that includes all incident details, which should improve future incident detection.