The numbers are staggering: 3.4 billion phishing emails get sent every day; 560,000 new pieces of malware appear every 24 hours; a ransomware attack happens every 14 seconds.
Today’s companies are getting bombarded by cyber attacks non-stop—and it only takes one to spark a major breach.
Each cyber incident now costs, on average, $4.88 million to mitigate, which is up 10% from the year prior. And even for small businesses, the damage starts in the six figures.
All companies must expect they will be attacked—aggressively, dynamically, and frequently. They must also expect that any security incident will have expensive, damaging, and lasting consequences.
Therefore, everyone needs to excel at incident response.
Cybersecurity incident response keeps attacks from becoming incidents and keeps incidents from becoming disasters. This article covers everything you need to know.
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What is Incident Response?
Incident response is the coordinated set of actions and procedures designed to effectively detect, analyze, and contain security breaches and IT failures, focusing on rapid intervention to reduce potential damages and minimize the impact on business continuity.
There are many different types of security incidents, from malware infections and ransomware attacks to data breaches and denial of service. There are also many reasons IT and data could go offline, from accidents and errors to natural disasters or building fires.
Incidents come in all shapes and sizes, but the goal of incident response always remains the same: minimize the damage.
It does that by detecting inbound cyber attacks early, stopping the majority at the security perimeter, getting the rest into containment quickly, and restoring the status quo. Everything a company does to defend itself against cyber attacks in progress falls under the broad umbrella of incident response.
But, again, all those diverse activities have a common goal: take the sting out of cyber attacks by preventing or limiting the damage and facilitating the recovery.
Security Incident Response Lifecycle
Responding to security incidents requires a systematic effort incorporating many systems, stakeholders, and security controls.
To keep things organized and standardized, the security incident lifecycle was developed, which outlines the crucial IR steps for how to respond to any and every cyber incident:
- Preparation: The lifecycle starts long before the incident first arrives. Companies need to always be preparing for the inevitable next cybersecurity attack by planning, prioritizing, and provisioning. Incident response plans detail all the steps teams will take during an attack to bring it to an end. This is the time to be developing, evaluating, and improving those plans and putting resources (tools, talent, policies) in place to support them. Never forget that incident response is continuous even if incidents are (hopefully) occasional.
- Detection And Analysis: Essential for incident response is seeing the earliest evidence of threats in the attack surface by collecting, integrating, and analyzing data from many different sources. Speed matters at the detection step because it may be possible to act early enough to prevent or mitigate damage. But it’s also important to collect and preserve digital evidence, both to aid with the investigation phase in the lifecycle and for compliance/legal purposes.
- Containment, Eradication, & Recovery: Upon detecting a threat, incident response must rapidly neutralize it by first containing it so it can’t move through a network or reach its intended target. Next comes eradicating the threat so that all traces, including anything intentionally left behind, are cleansed from the system. Recovery comes last, when companies restore data backups, rebuild systems, and restore functionality until they get back to the same state as before the breach.
- Post-Incident Activity: Just as important as any other point in the lifecycle is the period after an incident or breach when things are back to normal. Reviewing the incident reveals the specific vulnerabilities that allowed it to happen and now need to be fixed. It also reveals the strengths and weaknesses of the incident response and what should change next time. Those insights then lead back into the preparation phase, when security changes take effect, and the cyber incident lifecycle begins again.
Why You Need Incident Response
The share of companies at material risk of cyber attacks has risen from 65% in 2021 to 87% in 2024 according to one annual CISO survey.
Recent years have seen dramatic increases in cyber risk as companies depend on larger amounts of technology exposed to rising rates of cyber attacks. Just as significant, the cyber risk applies to any company regardless of size, industry, or tech emphasis.
The reality is this: every company on earth has a target on its back.
Yet not every company has an incident response plan, especially among small and mid-sized companies. Many have not made it a significant part of their cybersecurity program or put the time and resources behind incident response it takes to be prepared.
It can feel daunting to get prepared for anything. However, the alternative looks even worse.
Cybersecurity teams in 2022 had just 79 minutes after the first appearance of an attack to prevent a breach, but a year later that was down to 62 minutes.
At the same time, the average cyber attack goes 292 days between identification and containment. Speed matters when alarm bells start going off, and whether a company moves fast enough to keep damage from getting out of control comes down entirely to detection and incident response.
Companies that plan for incident response in advance have a chance. The rest only put themselves at higher risk and make it harder to recover.
Incident Response Steps
Multiple incident response procedures build on top of each other to help companies respond to security incidents, often from unknown or emerging threats with a widening attack surface to target, in a comprehensive way.
- Prepare For Threats: Prepare for whatever may come by developing an effective incident response plan, defining clear communication pathways, and training staff on exactly what to do throughout an incident.
- Detect The Threat: Look for anomalies, unusual patterns, indicators of compromise, or other red flags suggesting a threat is inbound. Work to extend detection to new facets of the attack surface while reducing detection times.
- Analyze/Identify The Threat: Use event correlation, forensic analysis, threat intelligence, and the security incident security matrix for an investigation into the type of threat, how intense it may be, and what it’s targeting.
- Contain The Threat: Isolate the threat as quickly as possible, ideally with automated response mechanisms, and ensure it can’t have any further impact so that systems can be restored to a pre-incident state.
- Eliminate the threat: Remove all traces of the threat by starting at the point of quarantine and working backward through the attack surface to the initial intrusion point. Eradication also helps establish how the attack happened to later inform what should change.
- Recover And Restore: Remediate the vulnerabilities and compromised identities that contributed to the attack and bring all systems and data back online as normal. Larger incidents may require a tiered process to recover that brings critical assets back online first.
- Incident Debrief / Lessons Learned: Carefully review each aspect of the incident response, and objectively evaluate the positives and negatives of each decision. Compile the lessons learned into incident response reports—honest evaluation helps each response go better than the one before.
Creating Your Incident Response Plan
Incident response plans are what keep a breach at bay. Every plan should include these elements:
- Mission: Define the top objective: protecting data, threat detection, staying compliant, etc.
- Strategy: Articulate the overall security strategy and goals for incident response.
- Approval: Show leadership approval for the plan and any ongoing changes.
- Instructions: Outline all the steps to follow throughout the security incident lifecycle.
- Communications: Plan how information will move between stakeholders.
- Metrics: Pick KPIs, targets, and tracking methods for IR performance.
- Maturity: Schedule when to test the plan and make security improvements.
Best practices suggest creating a separate data breach response plan.
For help expediting the planning process, use a SANS Incident Response plan, a CISA Incident Response plan, or another security framework like NIST. We also offer an incident response checklist.
Incident Response Best Practices
Cybersecurity incident response best practices come down to three buckets:
- People: Have enough cyber responders on hand to provide coverage round the clock, and give them the security tools and training to fight back against aggressive, evasive, and emerging threats.
- Planning: Always have an incident response plan, review and update it at least once a year, and include contingencies for anything and everything.
- Processes: Turn every part of incident response into a process that can be documented, taught, referenced, and improved upon to take the uncertainty out of a high-pressure security situation.
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Incident Response Pan Template
Follow an incident response plan template to ensure your plan incorporates best practices and checks key boxes around detection, containment, eradication, investigation, and so forth.
Templates are a great starting point. However, beware of adopting a template without tailoring it to your company and security because that could lead to unintended gaps and friction points.
Incident Response Policy
Distinct from an incident response plan—but just as important—an incident response policy dictates how a company approaches incident response at all levels.
It’s focused on preventing incidents from happening, and it tells people what to do when incidents occur. Smaller organizations may be able to treat plans and policies interchangeably.
Who Is Responsible For Incident Response?
Incident response plans should designate someone to be the incident commander and lead the rest of the team while keeping everything coordinated. Make sure this person knows their role and responsibilities in advance—along with everyone else involved.
If no current employee has the security background to serve as an incident commander, consider enlisting a virtual CISO to fill the role and consult on developing incident response plans and policies.
Types Of Incident Response Teams
A cyber incident response team is made up of security and IT experts with diverse skills who collaborate to resolve incidents as quickly as possible. There are three types:
- Internal: Everyone on the team is an employee of the company. This approach is the most expensive, but in-house teams know the technology the best.
- External: Everyone on the team works for a managed incident response provider. This can be an accessible and economical approach with the right provider.
- Hybrid: Internal teams rely on external providers to fill gaps in coverage or technology. This approach can be the best of both worlds.
Incident Response Tools & Technologies
The full spectrum of cybersecurity incident response incorporates many different tools and technologies, with each playing an essential role.
Some are for detecting threats across the attack surface, others work to deflect, contain, or eradicate various attacks, and backups help with restoration and recovery.
Integrated and managed solutions help keep the burden of remediation in check compared to the cost of buying and running the best incident response tools in-house.
How PurpleSec Helps Small Businesses Respond To Security Incidents
We understand that small businesses need incident response as much (or more) than any other company but often lack the resources it takes to respond to any attack, every time.
We created Defiance XDR™ to be the incident response solution small businesses have needed and wanted for so long.
It combines the power of our proprietary extended detection and response (XDR) solution to detect threats and automate response with the experience and expertise of our team, who manage the tool on your behalf and provide incident response services.
Strong defenses in the hands of seasoned defenders translate into elite incident response for anyone with Definace XDR™.
It even costs less than traditional managed service providers typically charge to detect and respond. Ready to feel confident about cybersecurity? Contact PurpleSec.
Article by
Joshua is a diversely-skilled cybersecurity professional with over a decade of cybersecurity experience previously working for the Department of Defense.
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