What is Incident Management?
Security incident management is the process of identifying, managing, recording and analyzing security threats or incidents in real-time. It seeks to give a robust and comprehensive view of any security issues within an IT infrastructure. A security incident can be anything from an active threat to an attempted intrusion to a successful compromise or data breach. Policy violations and unauthorized access to data such as health, financial, social security numbers, and personally identifiable records are all examples of security incidents.
Incident Mangement Process
A multi-faceted strategy for security incident management must be implemented to ensure the IT environment is truly secure. The ISO/IEC Standard 27035 outlines a five-step process for security incident management, including:
- Prepare for handling incidents.
- Identify potential security incidents through monitoring and report all incidents.
- Assess identified incidents to determine the appropriate next steps for mitigating the risk.
- Respond to the incident by containing, investigating, and resolving it (based on outcome of step 3).
- Learn and document key takeaways from every incident.
Incident Mangement Best Practices
- Develop a security incident management plan and supporting policies that include guidance on how incidents are detected, reported, assessed, and responded to. Have a checklist ready for a set of actions based on the threat. Continuously update security incident management procedures as necessary, particularly with lessons learned from prior incidents.
- Establish an incident response team (sometimes called a CSIRT) including clearly defined roles and responsibilities. Your incident response team should include functional roles within the IT/security department as well as representation for other departments such as legal, communications, finance, and business management or operations.
- Develop a comprehensive training program for every activity necessary within the set of security incident management procedures. Practice your security incident management plan with test scenarios on a consistent basis and make refinements as need be.
- After any security incident, perform a post-incident analysis to learn from your successes and failures and make adjustments to your security program and incident management process where needed.
What is an Incident Handler?
The incident handler’s job is to contain and mitigate the security incident. To do this, he or she plans, manages, coordinates activities, as well as communicates with other cybersecurity professionals.
Mainly, incident handlers define, document, and communicate the roles that various professionals take on during an incident. These roles vary depending on the severity of the incident.
Incident handlers establish, test and verify communication channels and communicate them to the appropriate personnel. This is a must to ensure the proper flow of tasks and communications.
They also ensure that all incident handling and response best practices, standards, cybersecurity frameworks, laws and regulations are followed and estimate the costs that an incident may incur.
Why is Incident Mangement Important?
Companies are regularly attacked by cybercriminals and often suffer long-term damage. With increasing frequency.
We live in turbulent, constantly changing times. The world is networked and digitalization is advancing. We experienced this very clearly in 2020, in particular, when more and more people moved their workplace to a home office. They moved from a network managed by IT professionals to a workplace with no corporate firewalls and possibly no professional antivirus programs protecting them.
This situation makes businesses a sitting duck for cybercriminals and poses major challenges for IT departments.
However, IT security is not just the concern of security specialists; it is also the responsibility of every single employee.
