Category Archives: incident response

DOJ Best Practices for Breach Response

Posted on by
3

I stumbled on this great release from the US Department of Justice – a best practices guide to breach response.

Reading it is rather reminiscent of much of what we said in the 80/20 Rule of Information Security years ago. Namely, know your own environment, data flows, trusts and what data matters. Combine that with having a plan, beforehand, and some practice – and you at least get some decent insights into what your team needs and is capable of handling. Knowing those boundaries and when to ask for outside help will take you a long way.

I would also suggest you give our State of Security Podcast a listen. Episode 6, in particular, includes a great conversation about handling major breaches and the long term impacts on teams, careers and lives.

As always, if we can assist you in preparing a breach response process, good policies, performing those network mappings or running table top exercises (or deeper technical red team exercises), let us know. We help companies around the world master these skills and we have plenty of insights we would love to share!

State Of Security Podcast Episode 6

Posted on by
2

The 6th episode of the State Of Security podcast is now available. 

This time around, we get one of the most personal episodes yet – a behind the curtain look of what it is like to manage the incident response team in a highly publicized breach, under strict regulation, for 6+ months. The insights here and examinations of the personal and professional impacts are profound. We also close this episode with our new “shorts” segment – this time with an insight from @sempf. Thanks for listening, and as always, let us know what you think on Twitter – @microsolved or @lbhuston. Stay safe out there! 

You can subscribe to the podcast in iTunes or via Podbean. You can also listen below.

First Step After Breach

Posted on by
Reply

Discovering an information security breach can be a shock! Picture it: you are enjoying a regular work day and WHAM! Suddenly you are at the center of an incident that could possibly affect the future of the company and perhaps your own future as well. It’s easy to panic. You know if you don’t do the right thing, right now, bad things are sure to rain down on you. So, what is the very first thing that you should do?

Go immediately to your incident response plan, of course! After all, that is the reason your company has put together an IR plan and team in the first place; to plan for contingencies so that personnel don’t go off half-cocked and lose vital data and evidence. 

But is your plan clear enough that regular system users or even help desk personnel know what to do first without having to thumb through a hundred pages of plan? If not, perhaps a simple little trick we use in our incident response plans will work for you. 

The very first thing you see when you open one of our incident response plans are employee and incident response team Quick Response Guides (see the example of an employee guide below-the IRT guide is similar, but more complex). 

I know from my military experience that having checklists such as the Quick Response Guides in place truly cuts down on mistakes and helps calm personnel during difficult situations. Why not see if they can also improve your response quality?

 

Chart

 













You can download the pocket guide here. 

Thanks to John Davis for this post.