Cyber Incident Response Plan

Are you a CISO or Information Security Manager looking for a tried and tested cyber incident response plan which outlines the step-by-step procedures to quickly handle a variety of cyber security incidents?

If so, you may find this resource useful.

The Challenge

For almost all organisations, they need to handle cyber security incidents. Most small businesses are under the illusion that they don’t experience cyber incidents on a daily or weekly basis. However, this is because they invariably don’t have the means by which to detect them, rather than the fact that they are not happening.

Mire than anything, a cyber incident response plan brings a standardised approach to cyber response, ensuring there is a minimum level of quality brought to associated processes and procedures.

Not all cyber incidents are material, but like most things – they tend to start off small and then if left unmanaged they can escalate and result in a significant data breach or loss of IT for the victim.

What is a Cyber Incident Response Plan?

A Cyber Incident Response Plan (IRP) is a comprehensive, structured approach that an organisation follows to identify, respond to, and recover from cyber security incidents. A cyber incident can be considered any event that compromises the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of data or IT systems. These incidents can range from minor malware infectious to widespread ransomware attacks.

The IRP outlines specific procedures and responsibilities to be followed when a cyber incident occurs, ensuring that the response is swift, effective, coordinated and standardised. Key components of a typical Cyber Incident Response Plan include:

1. Preparation: Establishing and training an incident response team, defining roles and responsibilities, and setting up the necessary tools and resources for incident management.
2. Identification: Detecting and confirming the occurrence of a cybersecurity incident through monitoring, alerts, and initial analysis.
3. Containment: Implementing immediate actions to limit the impact of the incident, preventing further damage or escalation.
4. Eradication: Removing the cause of the incident, such as malware or unauthorised access, from the affected systems.
5. Recovery: Restoring and validating affected systems and services to normal operation, ensuring that the threat has been fully neutralised. Conducting a post-incident review to analyse the effectiveness of the response, identifying any gaps or weaknesses, and updating the CIRP to improve future responses.

A well-designed cyber Incident Response Plan is crucial for minimising the damage of a cyber attack, reducing recovery time and costs, and ensuring regulatory compliance. It also plays a vital role in preserving the organisation’s reputation and maintaining trust with customers, partners, and stakeholders.

Why Use a Cyber Incident Response Plan?

✅ Quality of Response: you do not want each and every incident being handled differently. Each event should be subjected to the same robust process, irrespective if it is a small or major incident.

✅ Improved Reporting: as a cyber leader you’ll likely have internal stakeholders such as internal audit, and external stakeholders asking for evidence of cyber security compliance and resilience. When you apply a consistent approach to incident response you can generate interesting metrics (such as ‘mean time to respond’ and ‘mean time to resolve’) which can give these stakeholder groups comfort that everything is in hand.

✅ Regulatory Compliance: some regulators expect to see a clear incident response plan defined. If there were to be a major data breach and an incident response was not defined and followed, the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) would take a very dim view of this (and your fine would be in line with this!).

✅ Clear Responsibilities & Communication: one of the main purposes of a cyber incident response plan is to clearly delineate whose responsibility it is to provide which services or steps within the plan – it outlines who does what. This is not something you want to be debating in the heat of an incident.

✅ Minimise Damage and Downtime: having a clear and tested cyber incident response plan has been proven to drastically reduce the business impact and damage to an organisation as a result of a cyber attack.

How a Cyber Incident Response Plan Works

Typically, there are 2 layers to a cyber incident response plan.

1. Incident Response Plan: this is the action plan itself. Generally, it covers off the following key elements:

• Policy and Procedure Documentation
• Team Formation & Responsibilities
• Training and Awareness
• Incident Response Tools and Resources
• An overarching framework for responding to incidents which will cover everything from how one identifies an incident, through assessment, classification, remedial actions, recovery and to lessons learnt.

2. Playbooks / Runbooks: these are the specific step-by-step procedures that incident responders need to follow in order to work through and resolve the incident. Typical runbooks you might have:

• Ransomware
• Data Breach
• Business Email Compromise
• Malware Infection
• Denial of Service Attack
• Etc.

Benefits of Implementing a Cyber Incident Response Plan

• Strategic Alignment: ensures cyber security responses are aligned to other departments such as IT, Data Protection, Legal & Compliance, etc.
• Impacts Minimised: by having a well defined and tested plan, business impacts will be minimised as incident are resolved quickly and efficiently.
• Increased Resilience: an organisation who is able to respond effectively time and time again will build up a level of operational resilience to cyber attack.
• Demonstrate Compliance: having a robust incident response process can help demonstrate that your organisation of highly capable of meeting its regulatory requirements.
• Executive Comfort: senior management will observe your ability to handle cyber security attacks and this will build confidence in your cyber security team or function.
• Less Stressed Employees: managing cyber incidents is very stressful for both leaders and operational staff. Having a well tested process that provides some structure around each response is great at reducing stress levels within your people.

What Next?

Please download the resource today (completely free and no email needed) – any questions please get in touch with us.