Why Incident Response Plans Fail

Published: July 21, 2016

An effective incident response plan is only as good as the human engagement and driving force behind it. Unfortunately, this human component has its limitations.

There are only so many tasks an IT department can handle during daily monitoring, identification, and response to cyber security threats — throw in everyday IT infrastructure management, and vital forensic analysis of events and artifacts goes by the wayside.

This is where automation comes in — automation software can make or break the way your organization responds to an incident, and whether it can survive the event if the incident turns into a full-blown data breach.

The article cites following 4 reasons why incident response plans fail:

Rather than taking steps to identify, analyze, and respond to a threat, organizations often become mired in counterproductive processes and procedures that were never effective to begin with, further hindering response time and endangering the potential for a full recovery.

It isn’t enough to simply have a plan in place; you must be confident that it actually works in the real world. Making regular testing and updating part of an IR plan should be an actual step in the plan’s procedure, not an afterthought to be dealt with separately.

Putting an incident response plan through rigorous, realistic testing will demonstrate whether a plan is effective at mitigating the risks involved in a cyber-attack.

Learning how and why your attacker was able to exploit vulnerabilities in your network is an important step in identifying future attacks and mitigating long-term consequences.

Automation software can help you correlate incident events and artifacts by using established patterns and powerful search capabilities. Automation also allows you to scale incident investigation, reporting, and response.

By correlating artifacts and events, incident meta-data, and comments in ongoing forensic investigations and forensic history, automation software can proactively identify threats and any related incidents in progress or lurking in the background.

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