Building Cyber Resilience: Effective Incident Response

Companies need to be resilient in many different ways. However, cyber resilience is something that has only become necessary recently. Despite this, it is an incredibly important feature for every company to build.

This article will overview the idea of cyber resilience. It will cover what it is, how to build an incident response plan, and other tips regarding proper cybersecurity.

What Is Cyber Resilience?

Cyber attacks can be devastating. A single attack can wipe out a company entirely. Preventing this requires cyber resilience.

Cyber resilience is the ability of a company or organization to react to cyber-attacks. It serves as a measure of the company’s ability to fight these attacks at all points.

This starts with taking steps to stop cyber attacks from becoming a problem in the first place. Then, it moves on to responding to active attacks in a way that will either stop them or at least minimize damage. Finally, it involves how the company recovers from the attack, returns to normal, and prepares for the next attack.

Why Is An Effective Incident Response Plan Important for Cyber Resilience?

Cyber attacks can be incredibly expensive. The average attack is estimated to cost businesses around $1.85 million on average. Having a plan prevents a company from dealing with these radical costs.

Specifically, an effective incident response plan is needed. This is a detailed plan for dealing with cyber attacks. It should be as robust and complete as possible, considering every possibility. The presence of a plan like this will increase cybersecurity, allow a company to weather the attack, and, finally, assist with recovery.

This allows a company to keep operating despite a cyber attack. It gives them a plan that they can work with, which eliminates a lot of stress and uncertainty right off the bat. The plan provides initial protection, making attacks less likely to occur. However, having it also minimizes the amount of damage that any attack can cause.

Many elements of incident response are enhanced, amplified, or taken care of altogether by Cyber Crucible’s security software. This is a powerful security platform specifically for protection against ransomware attacks.

Looking to discuss the best way to protect and react to cyber-attacks? Schedule a meeting with Cyber Crucible so we can talk about the best options for your business.

The Steps to Creating a Good Incident Response Plan

A good incident response plan requires careful crafting. It needs to take into account preparation, exercise, response, recovery, and review.

1. Preparation

An incident response plan starts with preparation. Information about the company’s system and any potential threats need to be taken together. This should take everything that can possibly be considered into account. A good plan requires all the information it can get to get a true picture of the situation.

2. Exercise

This is the step in the process where a plan is put into action. The company should include a plan to run through exercises that simulate a cyber attack. This allows those involved to understand their role better while also allowing management to identify any potential problems that weren’t immediately obvious during the preparation phase.

3. Response

Response only happens when an attack takes place. It involves all of the steps that are actually taken to fight the attack. This needs to be paired with a way to collect as much information and data as possible. This will make it easier to evaluate what went right and what went wrong later. It will also be a piece of valuable evidence that relates to the crime.

This can be possible with Cyber Crucible’s security program. This program offers a significant amount of valuable data both during and outside of an attack. It collects information about when attacks happen, behavioral analytics, and the overall health of the system. It can even observe what is normal behavior for users to find security gaps and clues that something is amiss.

4. Recovery

The recovery stage involves putting things back together after an attack. It starts with verifying that the system is not still compromised. Then, it continues with restoring any data that was lost by using backups and resetting systems back to previously determined recovery points. By the end, the system should be as strong or stronger than it was before.

5. Review

After an incident is taken care of, everything that happened must be reviewed. This will help make any ongoing vulnerabilities visible. The review also needs to review the plan as a whole. If it wasn’t effective, the company can use the lessons learned to find a way to make it effective next time. Even if it was effective, areas of improvement can likely be found.

If data was collected with a program like the one from Cyber Crucible, it is useful with this step. The data will make it easier to evaluate what went right and what went wrong during the review. This can then inform future incident response plans and the general decision-making process. In the end, this improves security approaches.

How to Improve Your Cyber Resilience

Improving cyber resilience also comes down to following along with a few helpful tips. These will help any business bolster its defenses.

1. Understand the Different Threats

In the world of cybersecurity, knowledge is quite literally power. Understanding different threats makes planning for them possible. This has to happen on both internal and external levels. External threats include new methods of attack that criminals are using, while internal threats come from things like untrained employees who don’t practice proper cyber safety while working remotely.

2. Make Sure Your Incident Response Plan Is Repeatable

An incident response plan needs to be almost cyclical in nature. It should respond to incidents, learn from them, and then be ready to respond to anything on the horizon. Threats don’t just stop once one has occurred; they are constantly present. The plan needs to account for this.

An incident response plan that uses specific security software sounds great. However, if that software is compromised and goes down during the attack, as many do, the plan essentially goes out the window. This is why software that can withstand attack after attack, like the software from Cyber Crucible, is so critical. It eliminates this point of vulnerability by remaining operational during all attacks. With Cyber Crucible, you don't need to worry about repeated attacks as our tool will remain operational at all times, allowing it to catch attacks as they're happening and follow up accordingly.

3. Utilize Threat Intelligence Technology

Many cyber threats are almost predictable at this point in time. Criminals use the same methods of attack for multiple attacks on multiple businesses. So, the methods of defense are already known. By utilizing cyber threat information sharing, companies can respond to these threats automatically. This is possible through software, like the software available from Cyber Crucible, that allows for this information sharing.

Want to see if Cyber Crucible is the right cybersecurity tool for your business? Sign up today to try it out for free for 30 days.

4. Test Your Resiliency Constantly

Cyber resilience shouldn’t be a theoretical concept. Otherwise, a company will never know if it can actually handle an attack until it is facing one. The system should be constantly tested, and exercises should be undergone to ensure that the resiliency is really there.

A pair of glasses in front of a computer with programs running

The Importance of Cyber Resilience

Cyber resilience is something that every company needs to have. Being able to prevent, respond to, and bounce back from a cyber attack prevents these attacks from completely crippling business functions. Without cyber resilience, massive amounts of time, money, resources, energy, and more are potentially lost whenever a cyber attack occurs.