Why Every Business Needs an Incident Response Plan for Cybersecurity (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Why do businesses need an incident response plan? Opening a business can be a challenge, but maintaining secure and transparent services can prove to be even harder. This is where you need an incident response plan for your business. This is why businesses need an incident response plan. Firstly, what is an incident response plan? Before we get into why businesses need it, let's discuss what an incident response plan is and why tech service providers love it so much. If you didn't already know, business owners can organize their information with an incident response plan. With an organized approach, they are able to guarantee the safety of private data in case of a security break or serious cyber attack. And since IT security incidents can happen every day, it's really important to pre-plan what you're going to do if your business experiences a similar breach. The goal is to handle the security breach in a way that minimizes losses for the company. A team known as the Computer Security Incident Response Team is responsible for handling security breaches. They conduct all kinds of incident response activities to gauge external threats and help protect the business's IT system against cyber threats. The CSIRT often includes a group of well-trained staff that has a lot of experience in the IT arena. This staff can include representatives from other departments of the organization. This includes the legal, human resource, or even the public relations department. The key is to have a holistic set of individuals with information about the workings of IT security development. As you probably already understand, the incident response is all about having a fight plan ready to reduce damages in case a cyber security threat ever happens. But even though it's mainly concerned with the IT workings of the organization, it is also an overall business function that helps the organization perform better. Why is it important for businesses? Now that you understand what an incident response plan does, you should also know why it's important for business. Any online security threat that is not managed properly will usually lead to a bigger, more pressing security threat later. It might even lead to a data breach that could harm the company or leak private information. But if you respond to the incident quickly with a sturdy incident plan, you'll be able to minimize your losses and restore services soon. You'll also be able to learn from your mistakes and reduce further threats to the business. Incident response also helps an organization prepare themselves for both the known and unknown, which is why it's a trusted method to figure out if a security breach has taken place. It also helps an organization create best practices to stop intrusions before they cause damage. It's also important to remember that security incidents are expensive since businesses have to face all kinds of regulatory fines, legal fees, and costs to recover data. This affects future profits and can even damage a business's reputation in the market. A damaged reputation leads to lower customer satisfaction, lower investment, and a decreased chance for growth in the market. And even though organizations cannot eradicate cybersecurity threats completely, incident response plans help minimize them. The different types of cybersecurity threats. Various types of security threats exist in the world today. If that sounds crazy, you'll be pleased to know that there are ways to classify them. Some examples include a distributed denial of service attack against critical cloud services, or maybe a malware infection that has encrypted important business data across the network. Other threats include a phishing attempt by hackers that can lead to client or customer information being revealed to the world. All of these are examples of security incidents that are urgent in nature. So if these situations arise in your business, they must be dealt with immediately since they impact important systems that regulate information in the organization. If you want to understand incident response, you should pay close attention to an important aspect, which is defining the difference between threats and vulnerabilities. For example, a threat can be classified as a hacker that is looking to exploit or leak information for their own financial gain. This could also be a dishonest employee breaching and releasing company information for themselves. On the other hand, a vulnerability is completely different. It is technically a computer system weakness that can affect your business. Hackers can exploit your system's vulnerabilities for their own benefit. An incident response plan. An incident response plan is a bunch of instructions an incident response team follows when a threatening situation arises. If you develop it correctly, it should state ways through which you can detect security issues and also respond to them effectively. Without an IRP in place, your organization may not even be able to detect the attack that is taking place, much less solve it. It might not even be able to follow proper protocol to reduce the threat. This is why all businesses should have an IR document that would help them respond rather than react in panic when a threat arises. But if you don't develop your incident response procedures in advance, you might end up looking unprofessional when the time to secure yourself arises. And if the threat leads to a data breach, you will also have to involve lawyers in the process. Here are 6 steps you can follow to prepare for an IR situation. 1. The first thing you should do is to prepare your users and IT employees so that they know exactly what to do when a cybersecurity attack occurs. Instead of sitting there and panicking, your employees should know exactly how to deal with the situation. 2. After adequate preparation, your staff must also be able to identify if the event qualifies as a serious security incident or not. This is because finding out what you're up against can help you get rid of the problem. 3. After this, your incident response team should be able to contain the damage that was caused by the spread so that it doesn't harm other systems in the organization. 4. After this, they'll be able to isolate the damage and eradicate it from the system. 5. The IR team is also supposed to conduct a recovery investigation after the threat has been eradicated so that they can find out if parts of it still exist in the system. It's important to be as thorough as possible. What does an incident response team do? Even though an incident response team has a ton of jobs, here are 3 main things they're required to do. 1. An incident response team's primary job is to protect your data. This is because protecting your business's data is important for personal and professional reasons. And if you follow an updated incident response plan, you and your team can easily protect your data from getting into the wrong hands. If you're wondering about the dangers of your data falling in the wrong hands, you'll be surprised to know the amount of damage it can inflict on your business. Hackers can use it for all kinds of malicious intent, including using it against you or even demanding ransom for it. Your data can also be leaked to the public, which can create more problems for the business. 2. An IR team is also supposed to protect the relationship you have with your customers. Customers store a lot of private data with your business. This could include their names, addresses, contact numbers, and even their personal preferences. Other types of customer data that can be at risk is a list of their financial transactions and even their private credit card information. This is why a data breach harms the confidence your customers have for you. You probably know by now that it can literally be a PR nightmare for some businesses. Also, if your company is listed for trading on the stock market, shareholder confidence can drop dramatically after a public data breach. 3. An IR team also helps you protect your revenue. This is because the incident response they formulate helps you stop your business from accumulating losses after a data breach. A study at the Ponemon Institute in 2017 was termed as the Cost of Data Breach Study. It discovered that the average cost of a data breach that a business experiences is $3.6 million. This amount can vary according to the size of your business. But if your organization is listed on the stock market, a data breach can quite literally tank your investments. Thousands of organizations all over the world experience some kind of data breach every day. Some are more serious than others. But if they are unable to contain them, the organization can experience huge losses. So the faster your organization can have the best professionals on board helping you preserve and protect your data, you can even take help from security companies. These are third-party managed security companies that help large businesses protect their data from hackers for insider vulnerabilities. They sometimes charge a lot of money but do their jobs well. So if you're ever under threat of a security breach, these professionals will do the job before you even notice. But if you have a small business and cannot afford to hire a large security company, formulating an incident response plan with your employees can help a lot. And with that, we'll end this video. Thanks for watching.