What is cyber response management?
Cyber response management is the practice of planning, preparing for, and responding to cyber incidents and security threats. This includes developing plans and procedures to help organizations identify, investigate, and respond to cyber incidents and security threats in a timely and effective manner. Additionally, cyber response management can involve training key personnel on how to handle cyber incidents and security threats, as well as developing strategies to determine the best course of action during an incident.
What are some of the challenges in cyber response management?
Security teams that sit within Security operations functions are faced with more cyber threats than ever before. On top of this, increasing regulations pertaining to cyber incident response mean they now need to analyse, respond, collaborate, communicate, report, and comply.
Management and executive leadership teams need to focus on the people and process aspect of a function with expanding role types. Often, non-cybersecurity senior managers are faced with having to find efficient and effective ways to support and enable distributed staff in an area where skills shortages and burnout levels are high.
How does cyber response management software help organizations?
Cyber response management software assists organizations both in responding to and managing cyber security incidents, and supporting security operations teams. It typically does this across four domains:
- Analysis and Response
- Communication and Collaboration
- People and Process
- Reporting and Complying
Analysis and Response:
Cyber Response Management software helps organizations to prepare for, respond to, and recover from cybersecurity incidents faster and more effectively.
Usually, the software comes with the ability to connect integrations that:
- Automatically enriches data entered within the platform such as IoCs,
- Automatically sends suspicious emails to the platform for triage
- Automatically sends SIEM alerts to the platform for triage
- Enable other security tools to receive information from the platform such as messages, emails, firewall rule updates, etc
Capabilities such as playbooks provide a consistent approach to incident response that can help to reduce the cost and complexity of dealing with a breach.
Communication and Collaboration:
Effective collaboration among security teams can be hugely beneficial in a number of ways.
Firstly, it can help to ensure that everyone is on the same page when it comes to security policies, procedures, and protocols. This allows teams to work together more effectively, and reduces the chances of mistakes or oversights that can lead to security breaches.
Additionally, efficient collaboration can lead to better communication, which can facilitate the sharing of ideas and resources, helping teams to come up with more efficient and effective security solutions.
Furthermore, by pooling resources, teams can become more efficient, allowing them to focus on the most important tasks and reducing the need to duplicate efforts. Ultimately, efficient collaboration can help security teams to be more effective and efficient, and to provide better protection for their organizations.
People and Process:
Cyber Response Management software that has playbook capabilities can help to ensure that the right people and processes are in place to ensure a successful response. This provides visibility into the response process and can help to ensure that all stakeholders are on the same page. As well as reducing the cognitive burden on experienced staff, playbooks can help to reduce the amount of time and effort required to train junior staff members. Given the skills shortage in cybersecurity, this functionality is increasingly important.
Managing a security operations function without effective reporting metrics is a significant problem when it comes to understanding human resourcing. At a minimum, software should be able to track the number of incidents, time taken to triage and respond to alerts, as well as how long administrative tasks such reporting takes. Being able to communicate this with data to non-cybersecurity executives can help justify additional headcount can help to solve issues such as burnout long before it happens.
Reporting and Complying:
Cyber incident response data is one of the most useful sources of information when it comes to improving cybersecurity efforts. This data provides valuable insights into the types of threats that organizations are facing and how they responded to them. By analyzing the data, organizations can identify weaknesses in their security protocols and take steps to address them. Additionally, incident response data can be used to develop preventive measures to reduce the likelihood of future attacks.
Cybersecurity response management software that contains case management is a great tool for helping organizations comply with regulatory requirements. Case Management allows organizations to track and document all security-related activities, ensuring that all necessary steps are taken to meet the requirements of the applicable regulations. This includes tracking the progress of incident response, assessing the security of systems, monitoring and controlling access to critical data, and keeping a record of all activities related to the security of the organization. This helps organizations stay compliant with the relevant laws and regulations, giving them the confidence that they are meeting their obligations.
Fast reporting helps cybersecurity teams to increase efficiency when informing internal and external stakeholders during an incident by providing them with timely information on threats and vulnerabilities. Report generation that includes in-built ability to exclude information based on the level of "need-to-know" of the end recipient is best suited for cybersecurity incident response.
Effective reporting enables a data-informed approach to cybersecurity, providing the ability to identify potential risks, analyze trends, and forecast outcomes which help organizations to be more proactive and better prepared to face threats. Additionally, data can be used to evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of existing security measures and inform decisions about where to allocate resources. By leveraging data-driven intelligence, organizations can make more informed decisions about how to protect their networks and systems, prioritize investments, and allocate budgets for cybersecurity.
See this article from analyst firm IBRS on Cydarm's Cyber Response Management Platform and it's importance due to increases in executive concerns regarding cyber incident response strategy.