Develop and Implement a Security Incident Management Program

Create a scalable incident response program without breaking the bank.

EXECUTIVE BRIEF

Analyst Perspective

In today’s digital landscape, security incidents are an unavoidable reality for organizations, regardless of their size or industry. From data breaches and ransomware attacks to insider threats and phishing scams, the range of security incidents keeps growing. This demands a proactive and robust approach to security incidents.

It has been found that organizations with well-formalized incident response plans experience, on average, 55% lower costs and are 50% faster in containing incidents (IBM, 2020). When faced with a security incident, organizations cannot afford to waste time deliberating how to respond and must have designated roles and responsibilities so that everyone can act decisively.

As well, organizations need to track and measure key performance indicators (KPIs) such as response time, success rate, and recovery time regularly. Tracking these KPIs can provide valuable insights for continuous improvement and fine-tune response strategies.

Ultimately, a proactive security incident management approach empowers organizations to navigate security incidents with confidence and mitigate potential consequences swiftly when an incident occurs.

Nitin Mukesh Senior Research Analyst Info-Tech Research Group

Executive Summary

Your Challenge

• Security incidents are inevitable, but how they’re dealt with can make or break an organization. A poor incident response negatively affects business practices, including workflow, revenue generation, and public image.
• The incident response of most organizations is ad hoc, at best. A formal management plan is rarely developed or adhered to, resulting in ineffective firefighting responses and an inefficient allocation of resources.

Common Obstacle

• Tracked incidents are often classified using ready-made responses that are not necessarily applicable to an organization. With so many classifications, tracking becomes inefficient and indigestible, allowing major incidents to fall through the cracks.
• As well, outcomes of incident-response tactics may not be formally tracked or communicated, resulting in the lack of a comprehensive understanding of trends and patterns regarding incidents. This may lead to an organization being revictimized by the same vector.
• However, even having a formal incident response document to meet compliance requirements is not useful if no one is adhering to it.

Info-Tech’s Approach

• Effective and efficient management of incidents involves a formal process of preparation, detection, analysis, containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident activities.
• This blueprint will walk you through the steps of developing a scalable and systematic incident response program that is relevant to your organization.

Info-Tech Insight

Embrace the use of ready-made responses when handling incidents. These pre-established response plans can save valuable time and effort during a crisis. By relying on proven and tested procedures, your team can respond swiftly and efficiently, minimizing the impact of incidents and ensuring a consistent approach to resolving security breaches.

Challenges of inadequate security incident management

Lack of preparedness: A security incident management program helps to prepare your organization for potential security incidents by establishing clear roles, responsibilities, and procedures. Without such a program, your team may be ill-prepared to handle incidents, resulting in confusion, chaos, and a higher likelihood of errors or mistakes during the response.

Incomplete incident documentation: It is important to ensure that incidents are properly documented and there are measures for dealing with and resolving them. Without an incident management system, your organization may not have the structures to report and document incidents, which could impede root-cause identification, post-incident analysis, and the ability to learn from previous incidents in order to enhance future security measures.

Regulatory noncompliance: Some industries have specific regulations and legal requirements for incident management, data protection, and breach notification. Without an updated plan that reflects these regulations and requirements, your organization may fail to meet compilatory needs, which could lead to regulatory consequences, financial sanctions, or even a bad reputation.

207 days – Mean time to identify a data breach

70 days – Mean time to contain a data breach

(Source: “Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022,” IBM, 2022)

Defining security incident management

1. IT Incident

   An IT incident is any event that is not part of the standard operation of a service and that causes, or may cause, an interruption to, or a reduction in, the quality of this service.

2. Security Event

   A security event is any event or occurrence that could potentially have information security implications.
   • For example, a spam email is a security event because it may contain links to malware.
   • Organizations may be hit with thousands, or perhaps millions, of identifiable security events each day.
   • These security events are typically handled by automated tools or simply logged.

3. Security Incident

   A security incident is a security event that results in damage, such as lost data.
   • A security incident can also be a security event that does not involve damage but is a viable risk.
   • For example, an employee clicking on a link in a spam email that made it through filters may be viewed as a security incident.

It’s not a matter of if you will have a security incident, but when

The increasing complexity and prevalence of threats have finally caught the attention of corporate leaders. Prepare for the inevitable with an incident response program.

1. The average breach cost savings at organizations with an incident response (IR) team that tested an IR plan is US$2.66 million.
2. US organizations lost an average of US$9.44 million per data breach as a result of increased customer attrition and diminished goodwill. The Middle East and Canada follow at US$7.46 and US$5.64 million, respectively.
3. 83% of organizations have experienced multiple data breaches, with 60% of them having to increase the price of their services or products because of a data breach.
4. 45% of breaches happened in the cloud, where organizations with a hybrid cloud model had shorter breach lifecycles than those with a private or public cloud model.
5. The average cost of a data breach is greater by US$1 million if remote work was a factor.

(Source: “Cost of a Data Breach Report 2022,” IBM, 2022)

This research is designed for a chief information security officer (CISO) who is dealing with:

• Inefficient use of time and money when retroactively responding to incidents that negatively affect business revenue and workflow.
• Resistance from management to adequately develop a formal incident response plan.
• Lack of closure of incidents, resulting in being revictimized by the same vector.

This research will also assist business stakeholders who are responsible for:

• Improving workflow and managing operations in the event of a security incident to reduce any adverse business impacts.
• Ensuring that incident response compliance requirements are being adhered to.

Benefits of an incident management program

Effective incident management will help you …

• Improve efficacy.
  Develop structured processes to increase process consistency across the incident response team and the program as a whole. Expose operational weak points, and transition teams from firefighting to innovating.
• Improve threat detection, prevention, analysis, and response.
  Enhance your pressure posture through a structured and intelligence-driven incident handling and remediation framework.
• Improve visibility and information sharing.
  Promote both internal and external information sharing to enable good decision making.
• Create and clarify accountability and responsibility.
  Establish a clear level of accountability throughout the incident response program and ensure role responsibility for all tasks and processes involved in service delivery.
• Control security costs.
  Establish effective incident management operations to provide visibility into your remediation processes, enabling cost savings from misdiagnosed issues and incident reduction.
• Identify opportunities for continuous improvement.
  Increase visibility into current performance levels and accurately identify opportunities for continuous improvement with a holistic measurement program.

Short-Term Impact

• Streamlined security incident management program
• Formalized and structured response process
• Comprehensive list of operational gaps and initiatives
• Detailed response runbooks that predefine necessary operational protocol
• Compliance and audit adherence

Long-Term Impact

• Reduced incident costs and remediation time
• Increased operational collaboration between prevention, detection, analysis, and response efforts
• Enhanced security pressure posture
• Improved communication with executives about relevant security risks to the business
• Preserved reputation and brand equity

Develop and Implement a Security Incident Management Program

Create a scalable incident response program without breaking the bank.

Create and follow a pre-established workflow for every security incident encountered

Predefined workflows for each stage

1. Detection Constantly monitor until signs of an incident are detected
2. Analysis Leverage data to analyze the incident
3. Containment Contain the incident and affected system
4. Eradication Eliminate malignant components of the incident
5. Recovery Restore and monitor the affected systems
6. Post-Incident Activities Collaborate with stakeholders to review the incident's cause, effect, and remediation

Embrace ready-made incident responses to save time and respond swiftly during crises. Relying on proven procedures minimizes impact and ensures consistency in resolving security breaches.

Problem

• Your organization lacks a formal and structured incident management plan or relies on one that is outdated.
• There is a reactive approach to incidents on a case-by-case basis in the absence of a standardized processes.
• The inefficient incident responses and resource allocation due to ad hoc handling of incidents result in negative impacts on critical business practices.

Challenges

• Inadequacies in incident documentation hinder post-incident analysis and learning, while the lack of a structured incident Management System impedes future security measures.
• Non-compliance risks from failure to meet data protection and breach notification requirements exposes organizations to legal and financial consequences.
• Without a security incident management program, organizations lack preparedness, clear roles, and procedures, leading to confusion and errors during incident handling.

Benefits

Control security costs

Effective incident management operations will provide visibility into your remediation processes, enabling cost savings from the reduction in misdiagnosed issues and incidents.

Improve efficacy

Develop structured processes to increase process consistency across the incident response team and the program as a whole. Expose operational weak points and transition teams from firefighting to innovating.

Impacts

Short term

• Detailed response runbooks that predefine necessary operational protocol
• Compliance and audit adherence

Long term

• Reduced incident costs and remediation time
• Enhanced security pressure posture

Malware | Malicious Email | Ransomware | Data Breach | Credential Compromise | Third-Party Incident | DDoS Attack

Maintain a holistic security operations program

Prevent: Defense in depth is the best approach to protect against unknown and unpredictable attacks. Diligent patching and vulnerability management, endpoint protection, and strong human-centric security (among other tactics) are essential.

Detect: There are two types of companies: those that have been breached and know it, and those that have been breached and don’t know it. Ensure that monitoring, logging, and event detection tools are in place and appropriate to your organizational needs.

Analyze: Raw data without interpretation cannot improve security and is a waste of time, money, and effort. Establish a tiered operational process that not only enriches data but also provides visibility into your threat landscape.

Respond: Organizations cannot rely on an ad hoc response anymore – don’t wait until a state of panic. Formalize your response processes in a detailed incident runbook to reduce incident remediation time and effort.