Cybersecurity Incident Response Plan: How Your MSP Can Help

A cybersecurity incident occurs. What do you do? You know that every minute that passes after a cybersecurity incident is potentially thousands of dollars or thousands of records stolen. But if you don’t have a proper cybersecurity incident response plan, you may not know what the next step is. By the time you need a cybersecurity incident response plan, it’s already too late to formulate one. The time to make one is now.

What is a Cybersecurity Incident Response Plan?

A cybersecurity incident response plan is very similar to a disaster preparedness plan. Employees have to be trained to identify cybersecurity incidents; they then need to be empowered to act. They need to know what to do and who to contact. Everyone should know who has to be notified when a cybersecurity threat occurs, and how and when incidents should be escalated.

A solid cybersecurity incident response plan should include:

• Your team. This includes those who are empowered to act, but it also needs to educate employees on what they should do as well. Everyone should be aware of the incident response plan, so they can make better decisions in the moment.
• Detection. What actions should they take to detect and mitigate the threats? What tools should they use? What should be immediately protected and isolated? These are the first things that a cybersecurity team should do.
• Contain. A security incident can spread very quickly. Anything that should be protected immediately needs to be isolated so that the spread can be contained.
• Assess. Once the incident has been detected and contained, the team will need to assess the damage. How severe has the issue been? Some companies spend months trying to figure out how much damage has been caused through the use of forensics.
• Notify. If data has been breached, people need to be notified in a timely fashion. You may want to assess the severity of the event first, but you will need to notify them as soon as possible.
• Protect. Once the issue has been addressed, action should be taken to protect the system in the future, both from this event and other similar events.

And, of course, the process of repair will also need to begin. Having a comprehensive cybersecurity incident response plan means that this type of planning doesn’t need to be done on the fly.

Without a cybersecurity response plan, many employees don’t take actions when they identify threats. Important time can be lost as employees struggle to figure out what to do and who to contact, and it may not be immediately obvious who is responsible for addressing the issues.

The Benefits of Managed Services for Cybersecurity Incident Response

Cyber incident response is complex, and it requires that a company be able to trust its employees to act swiftly and correctly. An MSP can help. An MSP provides a number of services, including:

• Creating an incident response plan for your organization. As your MSP will be managing your security, they will be a critical part of your response plan.
• Providing your employees with incident response training. Employees can be trained when onboarded and at intervals regarding what they should do when threats are found.
• Monitoring the system 24/7. The incident response team cannot act if the incident is never uncovered. An MSP improves the chances that an incident will be identified quickly.
• Mitigating the threats. MSPs are skilled at mitigating threats quickly, and therefore saving an organization a tremendous amount of time.
• Proactively preventing threats. An MSP that is familiar with your network setup will be able to suggest changes and good practices accordingly, thereby proactively mitigating any potential threats.

Your MSP can help you not only create a cybersecurity incident response plan, but also can help you follow it. Moreover, your MSP can reduce the chances that you’re going to experience a major cyber security event.

If you’re concerned about your incident response, need to develop an incident response plan, or just want to learn more about developing one, Red River can help. Schedule a consultation with Red River today to take the first step towards better security.