As cybercrimes and security breaches become more sophisticated, data protection strategies have become more important to business survival. A critical element in an organization’s ability to effectively handle these incidents is to reduce downtime and minimize damage. This is where an effective incident response and disaster recovery plan comes into play.

The Center for Internet Security (CIS) offers Critical Security Controls (CSCs) that help organizations improve cybersecurity. CIS CSC 17 covers incident response and management. (In earlier versions of the CIS controls, handling of security incidents was covered in Control 19.) CIS CSC 17 focuses on how to develop a plan for responding to attacks and other security incidents, including the importance of defining clear roles for those responsible for the various tasks involved.

A cybersecurity Incident Response Plan (CSIRP) is the guiding light that grounds you during the emotional hurricane that follows a cyberattack. A CSIRP helps security teams minimize the impact of active cyber threats and outline mitigation strategies to prevent the same types of incidents from happening again. But as the complexity of cyberattacks increases, so too should the strategies that prevent them.

Taking proactive measures is critical to any aspect of a strong cybersecurity strategy. And today, the need for a robust incident response plan has never been greater. As more and more companies embrace remote work, we see an influx of personal devices on the corporate network. As a result, the potential attack surface expands while endpoint visibility is significantly reduced.

Cyber attacks on corporate networks were up 50% in 2021, and it’s expected that 2022 will see more of the same. Elastic Endpoint Security includes a variety of protection layers to ensure maximum coverage against different types of malware. There have been a few examples recently of the need for fast, accurate updates of user environments in order to protect against the latest malware.

The success of incident response relies on a comprehensive and robust incident response plan. In this blog post, we give an overview of what incident response planning involves and the key steps that make up an effective incident response plan.

From small school districts and not-for-profit organizations with limited cyber defense budgets to major Fortune 500 companies with sophisticated cyber defense teams, understanding what to do in the first 48 hours following a significant cyber event is essential in protecting your organization and limiting the potential damage.

When a breach occurs, time is of the essence. The decisions you make about whom to collaborate with and how to respond will determine how much impact the incident is going to have on your business operations.

Securing your software supply chain requires proactively identifying compliance issues and security vulnerabilities early in your software development lifecycle. Additionally early detection must be coupled with an organized and agile method of response that brings together developers, operations and SRE teams to accelerate remediation workflows across the organization.

Toil — endless, exhausting work that yields little value in DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) — is the scourge of security engineers everywhere. You end up with mountains of toil if you rely on manual effort to maintain cloud security. Your engineers spend a lot of time doing mundane jobs that don’t actually move the needle. Toil is detrimental to team morale because most technicians will become bored if they spend their days repeatedly solving the same problems.