Security Incident Response Reaches
Security Incident Response Reaches
Security Incident Response Reaches
Executive Summary
Current approaches to security incident response remain insufficient against
Contents the escalating volume and severity of security incidents. Organizations are
beginning to discuss in earnest a question: Can the security operations team
1-2 continue to succeed with only informal, ad hoc support from other technical teams?
State of Security Operations
Partnership between various operations teams such as security, IT, network,
3
Technology-Fortified and service desk is critical for security incident response success, and an
Cross-Team Collaboration “enterprise-wide” incident response strategy benefits all involved teams,
corporate leadership, and the broader organization.
4-6
Benefits of Enterprise-wide Security incident response strategy requires enablement by technology, and
Security Incident Response
this paper examines specific platform requirements. Major themes include
6-8 interactive automated guidance (aka adaptive automation), data continuity,
Enterprise-wide context preservation, shared toolkits, progress visibility, and reliability.
Orchestration in Action
This paper also explores the results achieved and an exemplar use case
8 enabled by such a platform.
Key Functionality
10
The State of Security Operations and Response
How Does Your SOC Stack Up? Businesses today experience security incidents at unprecedented rate and
scale. The volume of data stolen by cybercriminals doubles year over year,
11
References & About Us and the cost of cyberattacks overall is increasing.1 Deeply damaging attacks
(in which >USD$1M is lost per attack) constitute a growing proportion of
all cyberattacks as well.2 A security incident’s direct and indirect costs come
from many sides. For example, attacks causing network downtime cost, on
average, more than USD$100,000 per down hour and, aside from a lack
of availability, costs also stem from indirect factors such as legal liability,
customer alienation, and violation of government regulations.3
All of the above hamper incident response speed and efficacy, increasing the risk of damage and slowing
containment of significant breaches.13
These challenges have been difficult to address with products available to security teams today, as most
vendors see security incident response and resolution as primarily a problem for the security operations
team. Addressing the issues enumerated above, however, requires the participation of multiple technical
teams across the entire enterprise; thus, security incident response must be examined enterprise-wide.
*These topics are explored further in Security Incident Response Needs A Unified Platform. White paper. Resolve Systems, 2017.
The analyst must partner with system administrators in the relevant/affected technical team during security
incident response, however, the network and IT teams experience pressure to keep business-impacting
applications and services available, which may be at odds with security incident remediation.15 Thus,
the teams often find themselves at cross-purposes in the midst of a security incident. This further
heightens the need for cross-team collaboration in incident response.16
Additionally, the service desk team can support security incident response via its engagement in
both detection and remediation. It is often the first team to become aware of security incidents, both in
obvious user-reported attack types (e.g., phishing) and in subtler user-side warning signs of significant
breaches. For example, corrupted or deleted data, unexplained user account lockouts, and performance
degradation from unusual usage or traffic suggests a deeper security incursion may be in progress.17
On the remediation side, service desk is in regular contact with end users and acts as a valuable channel
to communicate essential security messages. In many businesses today, service desk is unable to investigate
and diagnose these incidents to solve the issue independently. Much opportunity exists to let service desk
teams drive solutions and work more closely with security teams.
OPEN COMPLETE
Security Event Incident Parallel Orchestration of Response Across Teams Incident
Case File Case File
Validation &
SIEM Enrichment
Network Desktop & Clients Security Systems IT Operations
• Attachments
Block bad IP Disable account Hunt for IoCs Collect logs • Automation
Recover affected Results
Isolate affected Enforce Detonate • Timeline
systems
system password reset suspect file • Notifications
Assurance that supporting technical teams execute quick and correct remediation actions is possible
only with a platform providing respective teams prescriptive, context-specific procedures and guidance. This is
a crucial element, as incident response procedures are often non-obvious and known only to Subject
Matter Experts (SMEs). However, IT, network, and service desk SMEs are rare and overloaded resources,
so level 1 (L1) agents will most likely handle requested incident response actions. As L1 agents are less
trained and less knowledgeable than SMEs, avoiding errors requires clear guidance without reliance on
individual judgment.
Indeed, a true force multiplier would be greater than automation alone. It would also be
a strategy that empowers frontline security analysts to do more without escalation.
Called “left shifting,” the power of SME-approved procedures and automations to lead frontline security
analysts to correct actions and decisions increases the entire security team’s efficacy. Such a strategy
benefits the security incident remediation work done by network, IT, and service desk teams as well.
As an added benefit, giving these teams improved visibility and inclusion in security incident response
processes fosters better understanding of cybersecurity, how it affects other teams’ responsibilities, and
how it applies to their day-to-day work. A superior enterprise-wide security incident response platform
also drives efficiencies across teams and enables further security operations empowerment over time.
A platform that:
»» Helps security and other technical teams share processes and tools creates multiplying efficiencies–
greater speed and lower cost in incident response
»» Creates a path to package IT and network activities and approve security to execute them, and vice
versa, builds unprecedented cross-team enablement. In addition, packaged automations can be
pushed to frontline agents like service desk
s s
Removal Request Guided Procedure Phishing Emails
with Automation Removed
An example security incident illustrates the improved response delivered by an enterprise-wide approach.
Consider the phish, a common attack type, sees investigation, remediation, and resolution with
unprecedented speed, efficiency, and documentation via enterprise-wide orchestration technology.
The benefits begin even at the point of detection: the service desk team.
Detection
An employee reports to service desk he received an unusual email prompting him to enter his corporate
credentials into a strange-looking login portal, which then loaded a blank page. This employee has become a
phishing email victim, and his corporate credentials have been compromised. With an enterprise-wide security
incident response platform in place, the L1 service desk agent who receives the employee’s report engages
the platform and follows a guided procedure that helps identify the issue and walks the agent through
issue-appropriate steps. The procedure zips the L1 agent to an approved IT automation that performs an
immediate password reset for the employee, thereby preventing further damage (e.g., data exfiltration, malware
introduction, etc.) to the employee’s account and associated corporate systems. Finally, the procedure guides
the L1 agent to create a new security incident in the enterprise-wide security incident response platform for
the security operations team to investigate further.
Observations
The platform enabled the L1 service desk agent to accomplish “first call” issue
s s
resolution for the employee, and it’s helped the agent take immediate incident
Removal Request Guided Procedure Phishing Emails
containment steps. with Automation Removed
Observations
The L1 security analyst has received the incident with full context from service desk,
and the platform guided the agent to tackle the most risk-critical incident response
s activities first (i.e., completing full containment) as well as engage the required IT
resources as soon as possible.
Investigation
The guided procedure continues to lead the L1 security analyst to identify this particular phish as a credential
harvester. The enterprise-wide security incident response platform provides adaptive automations to
quickly find employees who have opened the message and clicked the malicious links. Discovering several
compromised employees, the L1 security analyst receives another IT-approved automation to execute
immediate password resets for the additional affected employees. As it does for all users, the platform
automatically captures the L1 security analyst’s notes and actions, as well as all relevant data on the affected
employees and automations executed within the incident.
Observations
The L1 security analyst has quickly investigated the phish’s full scope via adaptive
automations
s and guided procedures. The enterprise-wide s security incident response
platform helped execute
Removal Request Guided critical
Procedure
with Automation
Phishing response actions without escalation or hand-off delay,
Emails
Removed
Remediation
Meanwhile, the platform sends a L1 IT operations agent the L1 security analyst’s request to remove the
specified “phishing messages and update the spam filter. The request comes complete with a log of all steps
taken by the L1 security analyst and the L1 service desk agent. The L1 IT operations agent is guided through
procedures and uses the platform’s adaptive automations to quickly find all instances of the phishing email
on the mail server, remove them, and update the spam filter to screen out related phishing messages
moving forward. Finally, the enterprise-wide security incident response platform guides the L1 IT operations
agent to send all affected employees (those people for whom the L1 security analyst had reset credentials) a
message with a templatized explanation of the incident.
Resolution
The incident is resolved when the L1 IT operations agent sends affected employees the templatized
message and closes the request, while the L1 security analyst receives notification from the platform that
all required IT operations steps are complete. The security analyst checks the notes and actions taken
by the other respective parties in the enterprise-wide platform’s log, and can rest assured forensic and
compliance experts will have all necessary incident documentation for post-hoc analysis. The L1 security
analyst closes the incident, and the L1 service desk agent receives notification from the platform that the
incident is fully remediated.
Observations
All incident stakeholders have maintained visibility into the incident resolution’s
s progress without having to take proactive measures or update one another manually.
The security operations team retained a complete audit trail of all incident activities,
including actions executed by both the service desk and IT operations teams. The
enterprise-wide security incident response platform enabled investigation, containment, and full
remediation of the phish with unprecedented speed, efficiency, and visibility. The risk presented by the
phish was minimized, while all engaged teams maintained optimal productivity.
Only with these offerings can an organization create a new enterprise-wide approach to security incident
response orchestration or enable a successful CSIRT strategy.
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