Sept 24, 2024 - Stronger on the Other Side: Improving After a Cybersecurity Incident

As cybercriminals come up with increasingly creative (and evil) ways to cause trouble, a solid incident response plan has become even more critical to businesses of all types and sizes. The Respond function of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) is focused on the importance of timely, coordinated actions both during a cybersecurity event, and after. A successful incident response isn’t just about containment and mitigation—it’s also about using that experience to discover ways to prevent future attacks, strengthen your resilience, and hone the effectiveness your response plan.

After a breach, delving into what went wrong and what you could have done differently allows your organization to determine where you can improve, and how to strengthen both your security defenses and response plan for the future.

Let’s a take a few minutes to explore the post-incident steps that can enhance your defenses and ensure you’re better prepared for a future cybersecurity challenge.

Step 1: Conducting a Thorough Post-Incident Review

Once the dust settles after a cybersecurity incident, it is essential to conduct a thorough post-incident analysis. Your goal is to look at what happened, why it happened, and how you responded. Typically, this process involves the following actions:

Gathering the Incident Response Team

A group including security specialists, IT staff, legal counsel, communications teams, and relevant business unit leaders should meet to debrief, discuss, and provide input on their individual experiences during the incident response.

Reconstructing the Event Timeline

This involves mapping out the exact sequence of events, including how the attack was initiated, when it was detected, and what actions each team member took at each stage. A thorough analysis of the timeline can highlight points of failure, inefficiencies, or gaps in your overall response.

Identifying Root Causes

A clear, accurate understanding of the origin of the attack can help prevent similar incidents in the future. Was it the result of someone responding to a phishing email? Or unpatched software? Insufficient access controls? While determining the cause requires technical analysis, it’s also important to consider human factors, such as employee behavior and training.

Assessing the Impact

Next, you’ll want to assess the overall impact of the attack. This includes both immediate effects (such as downtime, data loss, or financial costs) and long-term impacts, such as reputational damage, customer trust issues, or regulatory fines. Understanding the full scope of the damage can help make future risk assessments more accurate.

Documenting Lessons Learned

You’ll conclude the post-incident review with a thorough documentation of the lessons learned. Then, you’ll use those findings to develop updates to cybersecurity policies, procedures, and overall incident response plan. Be sure to share any critical knowledge with the entire organization to improve awareness and readiness.

Step 2: Improving Detection Capabilities

After a cybersecurity event, it’s fairly common for an organization to learn they need better detection capabilities. With insufficient detection, attacks can go unnoticed for long periods of time, giving your attacker more time to cause damage. Improved detection capabilities can go a long way toward preventing future incidents. Here are several key areas for potential improvements.

Better Monitoring Tools

Consider investing in enhanced monitoring tools and technologies. Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems, intrusion detection/prevention systems (IDS/IPS), and network traffic analysis tools can give you real-time insights into unusual activity on the network, so you can respond to an attack sooner.

Enhanced Threat Intelligence

Threat intelligence feeds can help keep you informed about emerging threats and vulnerabilities. These feeds provide valuable context on the latest attack vectors, malware strains, and threat actor tactics, which your security team can leverage to fine-tune their defenses.

Automated Alerts

Configure automated alerts to notify your security team immediately when abnormal behavior is detected. Immediate notification helps reduce response time and allows for quicker mitigation.

Step 3: Strengthening Preventive Measures

The aftermath of a cybersecurity incident can reveal the best ways to address the vulnerabilities that allowed the attack to happen. Here are a few strategies to consider:

Patch Management

Attackers love an unpatched system. After an incident, review your patch management process to ensure that all systems and software are kept up to date, and that patches are installed as soon as they’re available.

Access Control

If you determine that the incident was caused by a compromised account, it’s vital to evaluate your access control policies. Implementing stronger authentication methods, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), and enforcing the principle of least privilege can greatly reduce the risk of unauthorized access.

Endpoint Protection

This involves deploying advanced antivirus software, using endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools, and ensuring that all endpoint devices (laptops, mobile phones, desktop computers, and others) are secured and updated.

Employee Training

Whether it’s clicking on a phishing link or forgetting to follow security protocols, employees are often the weakest link in a company’s defenses. Improving employee awareness through training programs and simulated phishing exercises can help reduce the risk of future attacks.

Step 4: Testing and Updating the Incident Response Plan

While nobody enjoys a cybersecurity incident, they do provide a valuable opportunity to test your organization’s incident response plan and identify where you can make improvements. Here are the most common phases in the process.

Reviewing the Incident Response Plan

Look back on the entire team’s performance during the attack. Did everyone clearly understand their roles and responsibilities? Was communication effective? Did the team have access to the tools and resources they needed?

Updating Procedures

Connect any weaknesses you identified in the review to an update in your overall response plan. This may involve adding new steps, refining communication protocols, or regularly ensuring that backup systems are available and functional.

Conducting Tabletop Exercises

Once you’ve updated the incident response plan, you’ll want to use tabletop exercises to practice and test it. These simulated attack scenarios allow the team to execute their response to a variety of potential threats, ensuring that everyone knows their role and can act quickly in the event of another incident.

Step 5: Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement

Your cybersecurity strategy requires constant evolution to keep up with emerging threats. Building a culture of continuous improvement involves fostering an environment where learning from incidents is part of your organization’s security DNA. Elements of that culture include:

Regular Security Audits

Regularly scheduled audits should assess your organization’s security controls, policies, and incident response capabilities to identify areas that need strengthening or updating.

Engaging with External Experts

Sometimes, it can be beneficial to bring in external cybersecurity experts to assess your defenses and provide guidance on improvements. Penetration testing, for example, can reveal vulnerabilities that may not be immediately apparent to internal teams.

Feedback Loops

Security teams should work closely with IT, legal, and business units to ensure that lessons learned from incidents are shared and applied across the board.

Turning Incidents into Opportunities

While a cybersecurity incident can be disruptive, costly, and stressful, it also gives you a unique opportunity to learn and improve. By conducting a thorough post-incident review, improving detection and preventive measures, refining the incident response plan, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement, your entire organization can come away of an incident stronger and more resilient than before.

Join us for the next session of our Cybersecurity Webinar Series: 

You're invited to join us on September 26th at 1:00 PM EDT for "Respond: How to Ensure Business Continuity with Effective Incident Response".