Phases of the Incident Response Life Cycle

What Is the Incident Response In Cyber Security?

Cybersecurity Incident Response (IR) is a collection of information security policies and procedures used to prepare, detect, contain, and recover data from any incident. The main objective of this IR is to enable any organization to stop the attack, reduce damage, and prevent all future attacks.

What is the Incident Response Life Cycle?

An organization’s method for responding to IT threats like cyberattacks, security breaches, and server outages is known as incident response.

In other words, the incident response lifecycle is your organization’s step-by-step framework for identifying and reacting to a service outage or security threat.

Phases of the Incident Response Life Cycle

There are phases to define the incident response life cycle. We are going to discuss them one by one:

1. Preparation: This is the initial phase of the incident response and one of the most important phases. In this phase, the firm created an incident management strategy that can identify an incident in the environment of the firm. The preparation method involves, for instance, identifying various malware threats and figuring out how they will affect systems. Additionally, it means making sure that a company has the resources necessary to respond to an incident as well as the proper security procedures in place to prevent one from happening in the first place.
2. Identification: Teams try to find and identify any unusual activity using the tools and methodologies chosen during the planning phase. When an event is discovered, the members of the team must try to determine the type of attack, its origin, and the attacker’s objectives. Any information obtained during identification must be protected and stored for further, in-depth analysis. If an attacker is found, this can help you punish them more successfully. After an incident is confirmed, communication plans are typically also initiated during this phase. These plans provide information about the incident and the necessary actions to security personnel, stakeholders, authorities, legal counsel, and eventually users.
3. Containment: In this step, all possible methods are used to prevent the spread of malware or viruses after an incident is identified.
4. Eradication: The full scope of an attack is revealed during and after containment. Teams can start eliminating attackers and removing malware from systems after they are aware of all impacted systems and resources. This phase keeps going until the attack’s last remnants are gone. This may require switching off systems in some cases so that recovered assets can be replaced with new copies.
5. Recovery: It’s crucial to return all systems to their pre-incident state when the malware has been removed. This could include rebuilding infected systems, restoring data from backups, and reactivating disabled accounts.
6. Post-event activity: The final phase of the incident response life cycle is to perform a postmortem of the entire incident. This assists the company in understanding how the event occurred and what it can do to avoid similar incidents in the future. The organization’s incident security processes can be improved by the lessons learned during this phase, which will also strengthen and enhance its security strategy.

Conclusion: To operate effectively, every business needs a cyber incident response plan. Your organization should follow this defined procedure in the case of a cyberattack. It outlines the steps you will take to safeguard your data, lessen the damage, and resume operations. Most essential, this plan must be short, without filler, direct, and simple to interpret.

A Cyber Security Platform is a good place to start if you are looking to improve your cybersecurity program. A cyber event could have a devastating effect on your company and cost you time, money, and clients. Therefore, avoid waiting until it’s too late. Create your cyber incident response plan with CRI Advantage right away so that when an incident does happen, you can respond effectively and control the damage as far as possible.