Why You Need An Incident Response Plan Before A Cyber Incident Happens

Do you know what steps to take if your business is hacked? Have you developed a comprehensive incident response plan should your business get hit by a cybersecurity attack? Why do businesses need an incident response plan? How can an incident response plan improve your business cybersecurity? 

Cyber incidents are increasing and expected to continue to rise. Malicious actors are now using advanced technology, including AI, to find new, stealth ways to infiltrate IT environments.

If you think that the size of your business shields you from falling prey to a cyber attack, think again.

According to some estimates, 43 percent of cyber attacks target small and medium-sized businesses each year, and nearly half of those attacks (46 percent) involved companies with 1,000 or fewer employees.

Without an incident response plan, even a minor cyber attack can escalate into a major operational disruption of your business. 

After reading this article, you will learn the key elements every incident response plan must include. You will also understand why creating and implementing an incident response plan is a critical part of your business continuity and resilience.

What Is An Incident Response Plan?

An incident response plan is a formal action plan that all organizations should have in place before a cyber incident happens. It should spell out the exact procedures to follow when different types of cybersecurity incidents occur.

It must also define all the roles and responsibilities of stakeholders to establish the proper channels of communication if an incident were to happen.

Malware, phishing attacks, data breaches, or a denial of service attack (DoS) are all social engineering techniques commonly used by hackers to exploit a weakness within your IT environment. These and other cyber attacks would trigger an incident response.

Related Article: Social Engineering Incident Response: Tools To Help Prevent An Attack

Cyber incidents can still happen, despite your best efforts to implement various security measures to fend off hackers.

In order to remain a step ahead of evolving threats, developing an incident response plan can save you from major headaches down the road. In the words of Benjamin Franklin, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

By thoroughly analyzing your IT infrastructure and documenting the specific protocols in an IRP, you increase your organization’s resiliency to withstand such attacks.

Depending on how comprehensive your plan is, an IRP can protect your devices, software, data, and even your entire IT landscape. A carefully crafted IRP will help safeguard your valuable assets and minimize downtime to get your business back up and running quickly.

Your incident response plan will likely rely on a combination of human expertise and advanced technology, including machine learning tools, to continuously scan activity across your network and provide automated incident response (AIR) mechanisms to flag and quarantine any suspicious activity.

Your IT team would then be able to analyze the alert to verify the threat and destroy it.

What Could Happen If I Don’t Implement An IRP?

Not having an incident response plan could set your business up for even greater hardship following a cyber incident.

Depending on the cybersecurity regulations for your industry, having an IRP might be mandatory. In fact, even for most laws that are not specific cybersecurity regulations, an incident response plan is still required. For example, an organization is legally required to have an incident response plan for HIPAA compliance.

If you don’t have an IRP in place, there are several consequences you could face:

• You could experience reputational damage and subsequent customer defections
• You could lose data that might not be recoverable because you didn’t have a plan to respond appropriately
• You could suffer revenue loss
• If you are legally required to have an IRP—depending on specific regulatory mandates for your industry—you could face hefty fines and potentially risk going out of business

What Should An Incident Response Plan Cover?

An effective incident response plan follows the security guidelines laid out in NIST SP 800-61, the Computer Security Incident Handling Guide, which is considered to be the industry benchmark for responding to security incidents. It establishes best practices for incident response planning. 

To develop an IRP in keeping with the NIST SP 800-61 standards for incident response, companies must follow these 5 steps: prepare, detect and analyze, contain, eradicate, then recover and evaluate.

5 Steps to create a cybersecurity incident response plan: 

Prepare: Set up a team of stakeholders to develop and implement the IRP, define roles and responsibilities, provide employee security awareness training (including simulations and practice modules to test the IRP), and obtain any needed software or technology to strengthen your IT security.

Detect and analyze: Make sure you have a system to track and document incidents to preserve evidence and allow for response analysis.

Contain: Isolate any suspicious activity through an automated security control and block access, as needed, to any data, applications, or systems on your network until your IT team can further evaluate the threat.

Eradicate: If a threat is confirmed, take the remediation steps outlined in your IRP to eliminate the malicious activity.

Recover and evaluate: After recovering from a security incident, meet with the stakeholders within your organization and external managed IT services provider (if you have one) to assess what happened, security measures that worked well, and areas for improvement.

You can use the lessons learned from your response to help you prevent similar events from happening in the future.

What’s The Bottom Line With Developing An IRP?

After reading this article, you now understand why your organization needs to develop and adopt an incident response plan. With a well-defined incident response plan at the ready, organizations can be better prepared to handle cyber incidents effectively and efficiently.

It’s clear that business cybersecurity is an issue that won’t disappear any time soon. By taking proactive steps to develop an incident response plan, you will be prepared in the event your business falls victim to cybercrime.

Your IRP will help ensure that you have the defenses and protocols in place to effectively identify and respond to threats so that your business can quickly recover.

You may already have an internal team of IT staff who can create an IRP for your organization. If, however, you’re considering hiring an external managed IT services provider for guidance in developing a customized IRP, we encourage you to evaluate several options to find the right fit for your business.

The advantages of hiring a managed IT support include their ability to offer advanced solutions for proactive monitoring, threat detection, and incident response measures.

They also bring an expert team of IT professionals with broad IT and cybersecurity knowledge to recommend and implement the right security tools for your business, at a fraction of the cost of hiring your own IT team. 

Related Article: Managed IT Services: What’s Your True ROI?

Whichever direction you ultimately decide to take, be sure that you thoroughly evaluate your current IT infrastructure to accurately assess your security risk. 

If you need guidance in establishing an effective incident response plan or would like more information about managed IT support, use the button and one of our IT experts will reach out to discuss your IT needs and see if we might be a good fit to work with.