Are you prepared to respond to advanced cyber security incidents?
Just as firefighters and paramedics train for years to save lives, organizations today must also train and prepare to protect themselves by effectively responding to security threats to their IT infrastructure from all over the world. Now more than ever it is becoming increasingly critical as threats grow in scope and complexity.
Given this rapidly evolving landscape, companies are responsible to their stakeholders to evaluate the performance of their processes, staff, and technologies to ensure they can detect, protect, and respond to cyber threats and incidents.
Consider the following questions:
- When was the last time your company assessed your incident response strategy using an expert professional security service?
- Do you have a formal incident response plan? Is it tested regularly?
- Is your IT security staff trained in the techniques and tactics of current and potential future threats?
- Does your organization have the security clarity and capability to detect and respond threats promptly?
Preparedness
Preparation is critical when implementing an advanced protection and response strategy. Based on QMTechnologies’s years of experience with responding to hundreds of security incidents with our clients, we believe most companies should focus on five core capabilities: management, visibility, communications, intelligence, and response.
Management
The first step in evaluating preparedness is to decide if your organization has the right people in security roles. Are they properly trained and organized to respond to advances security threats and incidents? Are their roles clearly documented and defined? By ensuring you have and adequately staffed and trained security infrastructure, you are ensuring you have a mature and efficient security posture.
Visibility
Possessing adequate visibility into your network is key to detecting and defending your infrastructure from the activities of attackers. It is no longer sufficient to depend on a firewall for protection from the entire scope of malicious activities – most advanced attacks bypass or disable a firewall. At the same time, monitoring everything is neither practical or recommended.
Your organization’s ability to monitor, identify, and defend mission critical business components and assets is the key to protecting the processing, transmission, and storage of sensitive information.
Communications
An effective communication plan does two things for your organization:
- Provides accurate information about the threat or risk
- Ensures the information is flowing only to the appropriate people or departments
For example, if information is inaccurate or taken out of context and shared with the public, it could damage customer confidence in your brand.
Some questions to ask yourself are:
- When was the last time you tested your response plan?
- Do you have legal and communication experts in the information flow?
- Are all roles and responsibilities clearly defined?
Intelligence
Gathering accurate information about your attackers is the key to forming an intelligent and effective response. Good intelligence includes the attacker’s identity, history, and motivations will both boost and refine your capabilities to prevent, detect, and respond.
Response
When an attacker breaches your defenses, your speed of response is crucial in mitigating damage to your infrastructure and brand. At QMTechnologies, we know that possessing a response plan is simply not enough; organizations need to test their plans regularly. We highly recommend that companies have an incident response partner, preferably a cyber-security firm that is focused on advanced attack response.
Conclusion
In the end, we at QMTechnologies believe organizations should always be looking to evolve their approach to network security. Such an approach will always close the gap between a company’s defense capabilities and their attacker’s capabilities.
QMTechnologies recommends evaluating and strengthening your business’s security posture, including:
- Engage an incident response expert to give you a holistic view of your current strengths and weaknesses
- Assess your current protection and security response capabilities regarding personnel and tools
- Create and implement a strategic and tactical roadmap that encompasses maturing your incident response action
