HOW TO OPTIMISE YOUR INCIDENT RESPONSE
HOW TO OPTIMISE YOUR INCIDENT RESPONSE
The bad guys realize that the faster they move, the more they can accomplish: The more data they can steal, the more money they can extort, and the more harm they can cause to your reputation. So, it’s a race to see if the bad guys can outrun the good men. You don’t want to be on the receiving end of that equation.
Optimizing your alerting and incident response systems is one method to move quickly (which are, of course, tightly connected). In practice, what does this mean? It implies that your security solutions must be connected to the operations team’s workflows so that when a security issue is found, an alert is provided to people who can repair it, allowing them to take quick action based on reliable data. This will increase operational assistance and optimize security procedures.
Here’s an efficient method for improving incident response.
1. Optimize Alerting
You should consider improving two sorts of connections and procedures here: alert management and incident audit.
Workflows to Handle Alerts: Alert Management
When your security team has to triage an alert to evaluate whether more assistance and explanation are necessary, the supporting data needed to conclude must be readily available.
To do this, you must link your security alerting systems with incident management and chatops technologies like PagerDuty and Slack. In this manner, security alerts will flow straight into the tools and workflows that other stakeholders (such as your operations and development teams) utilize, putting all data about a specific security occurrence in a single location. And regarding answering, you won’t have to jump between tools to fill everyone in everything is in one location and visible to everyone.
Response Audit: Examining the Response Actions Taken
Once alert procedures have been automated and optimized, it is time to create an audit trail (i.e., event review and analysis). Audit trails document what was done to triage and respond to an alert, offering important visibility, accountability, and even a framework for creating or refining procedures.
Security teams must be able to audit activities performed within security solutions, such as:
Who was it that disregarded a specific alert?
When the warning was cancelled.
What annotations have been made?
This is useful both during an incident’s response (to ensure that protocols are followed) and after the fact. Your team should evaluate alert replies regularly to ensure that the appropriate reaction measures were implemented and to constantly improve processes. As a result, you can be confident that your team is always refining its strategy and keeping ahead of risks.
2. Optimize Incident Response
The easiest method to proceed quickly is to automate parts of the response process that do not require “human touch.” This is especially important in incident management and response. When incident management solutions are utilized to automatically offer visibility and alarms, cloud security may be better controlled. Furthermore, they can manage alert prioritizing — high-, medium-, and low-severity issues — so you can easily identify what to focus on first and what to put off until later.
Critical security alerts, in particular, help security operations teams when they are incorporated into high-severity operational platforms such as PagerDuty. This ensures visibility and alerting, making it simple for teams to acquire and act on information in real-time. Your team will be able to examine any important security issues within minutes of their discovery of the proper tools are in place. Here’s how we advise dealing with each level of warning.
High-Severity
So, these warnings are pushed immediately into the workflow for rapid attention. All high-severity security alerts should flow straight into high-visibility alerting technologies such as PagerDuty or VictorOps, automating the notification process and assuring fast reaction.
Medium-Severity
“Warning-level” security alerts should be connected with operational tools (such as Slack) via a platform like Threat Stack so that operations teams can view them in real-time, engage in discourse about them, and choose a reaction – all in a single tool.
Low-Severity
Low-severity warnings that do not necessitate immediate action must nonetheless be collected through a platform so that they are available for event reviews as well as the Compliance team for verification and compliance audits.
3. Evaluate Success
Once you’re alerting and incident management workflows have been optimized, you must test, monitor, and modify them regularly to ensure that the procedures operate properly for your unique business. The easiest approach to assess success is to examine your audit trails to discover:
The speed with which events were triaged.
How well incidents were triaged.
How many persons were involved in the triage process?
The speed with which triaged events were resolved.
How many security incidents went “unnoticed” (or were found too late)?
Other metrics specific to your company may be identified and tracked, but the ones described above are an excellent place to start. The more insight you have into what’s functioning, the more you’ll be able to improve your alerting and response procedures to handle security events as they emerge.
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