Regardless of how many cybersecurity initiatives your business has in place, closing off every possible security risk isn’t reasonable. Considering the numerous new threats that emerge daily and the ongoing advancements in technologies used by cybercriminals, for many businesses, it’s not “if” they need to deal with a significant cybersecurity incident, but “when.”
While it’s not possible to predict the potential impact each individual may need to deal with someday in the wake of a security breach, there are ways businesses can extract valuable insights from these events to help strengthen their defenses in the long term.
Below, we’ll walk through various steps businesses can take when documenting and learning from where and how cybersecurity incidents have occurred .
Getting Ready for a Formal Review
After a major cybersecurity incident occurs, the first step is to lay the groundwork for a methodical and impartial review of the incident. It’s essential to make this process less about assigning blame to specific departments or individuals, and instead focusing on gathering the core facts of the issue, collecting evidence to help recreate where, when, and why an incident occurred.
The tone of a formal incident review process are a good opportunity to build trust with your teams. Fact finding, rather than blame-placing, helps everyone remain open and honest about potential security lapses that may have occurred in their departments.They are more willing to help the business find a solution to avoid the same situation in the future.
Preparing Incident Analysis Processes
In order to start learning from a past cybersecurity incident, you’ll need to create a structured internal analysis framework. This lets you clearly map out each element that needs to be covered, while giving each individual involved an understanding of where and how they’ll be contributing to the exercise.
Information gathering is one, if not the most critical, element to successful incident analysis. Teams should collect any pertinent data or supporting evidence found in system logs while gathering historical system and database snapshots, along with recording any relevant timelines where network anomalies occurred before, during, or after a breach.
Uncovering Deep-Seated Root Causes
All cybersecurity incidents begin somewhere. During your incident analysis processes, uncovering the root cause of a breach is an essential component of accurately diagnosing an event. It will help you assemble all the pieces of your investigation. However, discovering where an attack originated shouldn’t be where your investigation teams stop.
Adopting a methodical root-cause analysis process will help your investigations uncover the underlying reasons behind an attack. For example, using the “5 Whys” technique can be very helpful.
This technique involves identifying the cause of a particular problem and inquiring about why it occurred. Rather than stopping at the first answer, ask “why” again. Repeating this process three more times can help your business gather real, actionable insights about all the elements that led up to an attack.
Turning Insights into Strategic Improvements
Identifying the root cause of security incidents is merely the starting point of your analysis process. The primary goal is to learn from each of these types of events, including identifying relevant improvements that can be implemented to prevent them in the future.
When you identify the root causes, create a list of potential improvements that may be necessary and any proposed actions moving forward. While there will likely be more than one area that needs attention, it’s essential to focus on the areas that are likely to help you see the most significant drop in risk.
Refining Threat Detection Mechanisms
Although having to deal with the aftermath of a major cybersecurity incident can be quite stressful for your business, there are some important insights you can take away from it. For example, these situations provide an opportunity to review your existing security toolkit, identify ways to enhance your threat detection systems, log new threat signatures, and update your operational policies.
By having your security teams explore ways to incorporate new intelligence into your security systems, such as fresh indicators of compromise (IOCs) or attack behaviors that can be used to enhance the effectiveness of your security systems moving forward.
Adding Preventive Security Controls
It’s important to ensure your business not only has the necessary security protocols in place to respond to a cybersecurity attack, but also prevents it from happening in the first place. Post-incident analysis provides your teams with an opportunity to identify precisely where existing safeguards fell short, allowing you to start closing the gaps.
When following your risk mitigation framework, your business should have discussions focused on hardening your system setups, reviewing any access restrictions you have in place, and segmenting your business networks for more effective isolation of critical systems and databases.
Iterating on Incident Response Capabilities
Having an effective incident response plan in place is crucial for ensuring that your business operations can recover quickly in the event of a major security incident. While you can run simulated attacks to help validate the effectiveness of the plans you have in place, a real-life attack scenario will show just how much you’re able to trust your response initiatives.
Depending on the outcome of a security event, you may identify critical areas that need to be adjusted moving forward to reduce response times and expedite recovery timelines. This may mean fine-tuning how information is shared across your teams, incorporating new perspectives, or even changing some of your third-party vendors.
Addressing the Human Factor
No doubt, as you begin to factor in the potential causes of a major security breach, you’ll discover a blend of errors associated with system configurations or implementations. However, there is also another critical component your security teams will want to consider – the human element.
Your employees are the front lines of your business, and whether they know it or not, they are likely under constant threat. These threats typically emerge in the form of phishing schemes or other types of social engineering attacks. It’s essential to identify when these situations have occurred to help your business prioritize relevant training sessions that can help your employees avoid falling victim to them in the future.
Enabling Knowledge Sharing Within Your Organization
A critical element of any successful post-incident analysis is knowledge sharing. Any insights you gain from investigating a security incident shouldn’t be reserved for only executive members of your organization. You want to make sure any critical takeaways are shared with all departments, to help them understand where and how security protocols went wrong and how they can be addressed.
Knowledge sharing is important in multiple areas of your business. However, it should not just be related to findings from security-related incidents. For example, making sure employees are aware of various compliance standards when using AI tools, following best practices when creating login credentials, or knowing how to safely lock their devices when not in use all contribute to strengthening a business’s resilience.
Create Stronger Defenses for Your Business
Hopefully, your business never has to worry about conducting post-security incident analysis. However, if you do, there are some important lessons that can be learned, provided you take the right approach.
By following the strategies discussed, you can adopt an organized and methodical approach to investing based on security-related events, gaining valuable insights that can help you avoid various data security and compliance issues while building stronger, more reliable defenses.
