With cyber attacks increasing in frequency and damage, it’s more important than ever for organizations to understand that an incident of any scale is more of a “when” than an “if.” That means that, as part of a comprehensive security strategy, organizations should not only focus on keeping threats out but also ensure that if a threat turns into an incident, they’re prepared to swiftly respond and recover.
Preparation is more complex than just dialing a phone number and asking a third party for help during an incident and letting them take the reins. While the act of incident response — meaning the processes and tools used to identify, contain, and remediate a cyber incident — happens in the moment, strong incident response follows a lifecycle with proactive, pre-incident components.
Within the “preparedness” stage of the incident response lifecycle lies planning and readiness, two critical components to proactive incident response that puts an organization in the best possible position to fight back against a threat actor during an incident.
What is IR Planning and Its Value for Organizations?
An incident response plan is the set of instructions for members of an organization and third parties to follow if an incident occurs. These directives are often tied to specific scenarios;, for example, what to do if a ransomware attack happens, or if a business email compromise incident is successful.
While IR planning will vary based on each organization’s operational needs, security maturity, and partners, there are usually standard components and templates, including:
- A formal policy on how your organization responds to specific scenarios
- The roles and responsibilities of your stakeholders and possibly your designated incident response team
- Playbooks that offer basic procedures for certain incident scenarios
- Your organization’s communication plan, including internal and external communication to stakeholders, the C-suite, law enforcement, your partners, or even your cyber insurance provider
An incident response plan example would include:
- What is your standard, step by step response to a specific attack vector?
- Who is involved in the response (from your security engineers to your communications team to your c-suite)?
- What is the responsibility of each of these individuals (contacting law enforcement, communicating to the press, or speaking to investors)?
- What is the step- by- step procedure for containing and stopping specific attack scenarios (disconnecting servers, contacting your digital forensics partners).
IR planning is vital to a strong incident response, as it can shorten response and remediation time, streamline digital forensics, help identify and prepare key stakeholders, and support business continuity. According to the 2024 IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report, having IR planning in place, as well as an IR team, can reduce the average cost of an incident by a total of $473,706 USD.
By establishing best practices, your organization puts itself in a better position to defend against both known and unknown threats, while communicating to your business partners – investors, shareholders, insurance providers, and executives – that you’ve taken the steps to minimize cyber risk and potential damage.
Learn more about how IR planning helps with insurability.
What is Incident Readiness?
Incident readiness is similar to IR planning, and the terms should be thought of as two sides of the same coin. If your IR plan is the “pen to paper” of how your organization will respond to an incident, then incident readiness is ensuring that every aspect of that plan is optimized and ready for success.
IR readiness involves:
- Developing the chain of command during an incident and ensuring every stakeholder understands exactly what they need to do
- Ensuring your organization’s playbook is thorough, complete, and tested
- Making sure you have the right cyber insurance coverage, legal counsel, and IR provider in place
- Conducting penetration testing, tabletop exercises, and other testing measures to further harden your security posture and IR plan
- Assessing and addressing your security and IR plan gaps
The assessment component is key to IR readiness, as it creates visibility and actions items that improve your organization’s security posture. A strong assessment should include the testing of, and hardening of, your infrastructure, processes, and team.
DFIR and Incident Readiness
Digital forensics and incident response retainer services (DFIR) are another component of incident readiness organizations can employ. Deployed and managed by third parties, these services are a strong option for organizations that may be smaller, have less in-house expertise, or are less security mature. DFIR services are becoming a requirement for many cyber insurance policies, with Gartner® stating that “Cyber insurance policies typically require organizations to have a DFIR retainer to ensure a minimum level of readiness and to minimize potential loss.”
It’s important to note that while DFIR can assist with planning and readiness, the retainer component is critical for in-the-moment incident response. These services offer more end-to-end coverage.
While DFIR services vary by vendor, there are a few consistent requirements, as defined by Gartner®. These include:
- Pre-incident design and assessment
- Post-incident response assistance
- Pre-paid retainers
Learn more about DFIR with the 2024 Gartner® Market Guide for Digital Forensics and Incident Response Retainer Services.
Enhancing Your Incident Response with Arctic Wolf
As an industry-leading security operations provider, Arctic Wolf is dedicated to ensuring your organization has support before, during, and after an incident.
The Arctic Wolf® Incident Response Jumpstart Retainer does exactly that. In addition to an industry-leading 1-hour SLA and access to an insurance-approved IR team, our retainer offers a one-on-one IR plan review, battle-tested incident runbooks, storage for all your IR planning documents, and more.
Arctic Wolf also offers Cyber JumpStart, an easy-to-use portal to fortify your planning and readiness procedures. Perfect for organizations just starting their IR planning process, the portal includes a built-in IR planner template organizations can fill out and securely store (both within Arctic Wolf and offline), guides to help your organization harden your security posture for better IR and insurability (including common cyber controls and how different Arctic Wolf solutions can reduce your risk profile), and a cyber resilience assessment, which is aligned to NIST CF 2.0 and CIS Security Controls, to help your organization identify and harden specific security gaps.
By having all these tools under one platform, organizations can address their proactive IR needs holistically, ensuring that every part of their preparation is aligned and thorough.
Learn more about the Arctic Wolf® Incident Response Jumpstart Retainer.
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