[Ebook] The Guide for Speeding Time to Response for Lean IT Security Teams

Most cyber security today involves much more planning, and much
less reacting than in the past. Security teams spend most of their
time preparing their organizations’ defenses and doing operational
work. Even so, teams often must quickly spring into action to
respond to an attack.

Security teams with copious resources can quickly shift between
these two modes. They have enough resources to allocate to respond
properly. Lean IT security teams, however, are more hard-pressed to
react effectively. A new guide by XDR provider Cynet (download here^[1]), however, argues that
lean teams can still respond effectively. It just takes some
work.

For teams that are resource-constrained, success starts with
having a clear plan and putting the tools and infrastructure in
place for the organization to follow properly. The guide breaks
down the tools, factors, and knowledge that go into optimizing an
organization’s time to respond.

Building a successful incident response plan

Today’s cyber-attacks take hours or less to succeed. Once
ransomware is activated, it takes just a few seconds to begin
encrypting any file it finds. This makes speed one of the biggest
keys to success in mitigating the damage and preventing further
attacks. Any delay could be disastrous.

To avoid delays from the start – whether they stem from
communication issues, lack of defined roles, or simply not knowing
what to do – lean organizations must build clear, transparent
incident response plans.

According to the guide, a good incident response plan includes
these six elements:

• Preparation – building a strong organizational
  security policy and constantly looking for potential threats.
• Identification – the ability to identify
  threats by correlating signals and data from a wide range of
  sources (from devices to networks)
• Containment – The ability to quickly find and
  isolate the malicious attack, both in the short and long terms
• Eradication – Once a threat is contained and
  identified, a successful incident response plan will focus on
  removing it entirely from the environment.
• Recovery – the ability to quickly return to
  normalcy and standard operations by restoring affected devices and
  networks
• Lessons learned – understanding the attack,
  its sources, and how to prevent similar strategies from succeeding
  in the future.

Having the right tools

A good plan is a great start, but it’s not enough by itself.
Lean security teams must have the right tools and platforms to help
them cover the gaps in their defenses without creating more work
and stress. This is where tools such as response automation,
advanced detection and response, network security, and threat
intelligence come into play.

More important, though, is how teams build the right stack to
maximize their efforts without getting bogged down in managing a
complex system. In terms of speed to response, having tools on a
single pane of glass offers the best opportunity to respond quickly
to an attack.

You can learn more by downloading the guide here^[2].