An IR or incident response is used to describe the process of an organization handling a cyberattack or data breach, including how the business attempts to manage the consequences of the attack or breach (incident). The goal is to manage that incident effectively so that the same is limited and both recovery costs and time and the collateral damage, such as brand reputation.

IR manages the following:

  • Identify an attack
  • Minimize the effects
  • Contain damage
  • Remediate the cause

These are handled to reduce the risk of possible incidents. Every company has some level of incident. A clear IR plan is a must-have in the organizations. The plan must define what constitutes an incident for the business and provide a clear princess when the incident occurs. In addition, it is advisable to specify the employees, teams, or leaders responsible for:

  1. Managing entire incident response initiative
  2. Tasked with taking actions on the specified incident response plan

Handling incident responses

IR is conducted by a company’s computer IR team (CIRT), known as cyber incident response. It is a compromise of general IT staff and security with human resources and public relations departments. The CIR is responsible for security viruses, breaches, and other possible catastrophic incidents that may face security risks.

cyber incident response

Steps for effective IR

There are six steps for effective IR, such as:

  1. Preparation. Preparing for a required security breach is the most essential phase. Preparation helps companies determine how good the CIR to:
    1. Respond to an incident and involve policy
    2. Response strategy/plan
    3. Communication
    4. Documentation
    5. Determining Computer IR team members
    6. Tools
    7. Training
    8. Access control
  2. Identification. It is a process through which an incident is detected, speed responds, and reduces costs and damages. IT staff collect events from monitoring tools, log files, intrusion detection systems, error messages, firewalls to determine and detect incidents and the scope.
  3. Containment. When an incident is identified or detected, containing it is a priority. The primary purpose of containment is to contain damage and prevent damage from happening.
  4. Eradication. A phase of effective IR entails eliminating the threat and then restoring affected systems to the previous state while minimizing the data loss. Proper steps are performed such as removing malicious content and ensuring affected systems are completely clean.
  5. Recovery. Testing, validating, and monitoring systems are used. This phase includes decision-making to restore operations, testing, and verifying the system.
  6. Lesson learned. It is a crucial phase as it helps to educate and enhance future IR efforts. It allows the company to update the IR plans with details that have been missed throughout the incident as well as the documentation to have information for future incidents.

Proper planning and preparation are the keys to effective IR.