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Cybersecurity Incident Response Training | How to Develop In-House IR Capability

Cybersecurity Incident Response Training 2

We’re living in turbulent times, especially in the cybersecurity space. Statistics indicate that threats are on the rise, with Q2 2024 recording a 30 percent YoY increase in attacks across organizations globally.

It appears not to be a matter of if your organization will experience a cybersecurity incident, but when. Therefore, preparation is key. Having an incident response plan in place is a great start, but has it been tested? Can your team execute it flawlessly under the intense pressure of a real-world security incident? 

That’s why cybersecurity incident response training has become essential for organizations hoping to weather the storm independently or semi-independently if they find they’ve been compromised.

Why is Cybersecurity Incident Response Training Important?

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When disaster strikes, many teams are unequipped to mitigate the damage using their internal resources. Turning to an external incident response provider is often the best and only choice, but these services can be very costly for SMBs, and not every incident necessarily warrants a full-scale incident response engagement.

Where your company’s threshold for bringing in outside help lies depends on a lot of internal factors and the severity of a potential breach, but there’s always more we can do to empower our teams internally and expand their ability to respond to different kinds of security threats and incidents.

It’s imperative, these days, to establish standardized security policies, configure your network and software according to best security practices, and invest in monitoring software and regular security audits to double-check remediation efforts and patch-efficacy, but are you conducting cybersecurity incident response training as well?

Incident Response Training is NOT All or Nothing

There are two points to understand here: First, almost any level of training and internal response capability is better than nothing. Even if your company can’t handle a full-scale ransomware event independently, there are lots of things that probably could be in your wheelhouse. The second is that an incident response policy template on its own isn’t going to cut it. At least not untested. It’s a start, yes, but an IR policy template will do nothing to help you in the real world all on its own.

Proper training equips staff with the skills required to detect, respond, contain, and recover from an attack in the shortest time and most effective manner. This helps reduce an organization’s operational disruptions and the associated financial, legal, and reputational implications.

Having well-trained and knowledgeable staff monitoring your network and prepared to respond to threats can eliminate the need to bring in outside contractors for minor incidents or scares, and even prevent much larger-scale attacks from fully penetrating your organization’s defenses.

How to Implement In-House Cybersecurity Incident Response Training

The most important decision before conducting incident response training is whether or not to outsource the training process itself. 

This will depend on several factors, including convenience, available expertise, and business size. If you decide to have an in-house training program, you can follow the steps and best practices outlined below:

Establish an Incident Response Team

Having a dedicated team to handle incidents is essential for quick recovery. 

This helps reduce the confusion that usually occurs during an attack when there aren’t well-defined roles and responsibilities. To create an incident response team, your organization can have a standalone department or simply appoint individuals from other departments, such as IT, cybersecurity, and communications, to handle different aspects of incident response. The latter, of course, is usually the preferred method for small to medium-sized businesses looking to keep staffing costs low and maximize their existing resources. In such cases, it’s common for one person to take on multiple roles to help keep staffing costs low.

Alternatively, you can leverage managed incident response services if your organization doesn’t have the staff or capabilities to manage incidents effectively. These services can act as an extension of your internal team by offering professional support during a breach or threat.

Whichever way you choose to go, the response team should include the following roles:

  • Incident Manager: Oversees and coordinates the incident response activities. They’re responsible for delegating tasks among the incident response team, and should there be no one to handle a certain role, pick up the slack themselves.
  • Investigative Lead: Responsible for leading probes to find the incident’s root cause. This individual will usually be in charge of a team of analysts who conduct the incident postmortem.
  • Communications Specialist: Handles communication within the organization and externally regarding the progress of the incident. They inform internal leaders, such as executives, and external stakeholders, like customers and shareholders.
  • Subject Matter Expert: Possesses expertise in the affected system or service. They suggest and coordinate the implementation of remediations. 

Develop a Cyber Incident Response Training Curriculum

There are several ways organizations can conduct critical incident response training, including:

Learning Materials

Standard incident response training materials serve as an introduction to incident response concepts for your team. They empower staff with theoretical knowledge for handling incidents. Learning materials can be found in the form of e-books, webinars, videos, online courses, and whitepapers that cover topics like threat identification, response procedures, and recovery best practices.

CISA is a reputable source for IR training materials and a great place to start!

Tabletop Exercises

Closely related to simulated exercises, tabletop exercises are discussion-based sessions where team members discuss hypothetical scenarios and establish their roles and responsibilities. These discussions focus on the strategic aspects of incident response, such as decision-making, coordination, and communication. They help test the team’s collaboration.

Simulated Incident Exercises

Simulated incidents are developed to dry-run various real-life cyber incidents to teach response teams how to handle the real thing. This is one of the most common and effective ways we recommend to train incident response teams and should come after providing teams with learning materials to test their response capabilities and shore up any weaknesses uncovered in the process. These exercises are critical to building muscle memory so that your team can act quickly and confidently during an actual attack.

Wrapping Up

Cyber incidents can feel inevitable. As a result of staggering global statistics and a constant new stream of horror stories, we’re all more aware than ever of how critical it is to take adequate proactive measures, 

Having a robust, and well-trained cybersecurity incident response team and procedure in place is one of the most tried and true ways of mitigating the impact on your organization’s day-to-day operations.

At Blue Team Alpha, we’re here to help, don’t hesitate to reach out

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