Every organization nowadays uses the Internet. However, when you involve tech in your business, security vulnerabilities emerge. Malicious actors can exploit these vulnerabilities, resulting in a small or big cyberattack. However, businesses can prevent and respond to this event by using the best incident response tools.
Such tools minimize the effect of a cyberattack and look for further vulnerabilities to avoid future threats.
What are incident response tools?
Incident response tools help address and manage their response to security events by offering various functionalities, including prevention, detection, and response. These features enable organizations to handle security incidents in a standardized manner that limits the scope of the damage, minimizes recovery time, and reduces the costs of cyberattacks and breaches.
Organizations employ incident response tools to execute a program that standardizes response efforts across the entire organization and relevant parties. Some organizations follow the military-derived OODA loop for incident response, which involves observing, orienting, deciding, and acting (OODA) during security incidents.
Incident response tools can help automate and streamline certain incident response functions within the loop to reduce system errors and detection times. They provide visibility and control, including information related to abnormal behavior that requires further investigation, and initiate direct response efforts to minimize security risks.
Why is having an incident response plan important?
With the growing number and severity of cyber threats and the growing complexity of IT environments, organizations must re-energize their incident response and recovery processes.
Zero-day vulnerabilities increase yearly, and threats become more sophisticated. Many are executed by organized crime groups and state-sponsored threat actors. The attack surface is increasing with the proliferation of cloud environments and the growing problem of insecure configurations.
A robust incident response plan helps align the organization around effective cyberattack response and recovery. With proper planning and a designated incident response team, employees know who makes decisions and how to prioritize actions. A clear, well-documented plan for handling information security incidents can help your team take action quickly and effectively.
An incident response plan can help an organization:
- Identify incident response leaders to follow response activities.
- Ensure that team members and security tools cover all essential functions.
- Enable process owners to determine the appropriate action when an incident occurs.
- Make sure that the application security efforts are coordinated with the incident responders.
Incident response plans are crucial for cybersecurity efforts and can also impact compliance. Some compliance standards specifically require incident response plans. These include NIST Special Publication 800-53, NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF), NIST 800-61, and the CIS 18 Critical Security Controls (CSCs).
Incident response tools and technologies to boost your IR process
Below are the best IR tools based on our tests and thorough research. You can use them for your business to prevent future cyber threats:
SIEM
Security information and event management (SIEM) is a security management approach that unifies security information management (SIM) and security event management (SEM) into one security management system. SIEM systems aggregate data from several sources to identify deviations from a preestablished baseline and apply the appropriate action.
A SIEM system can use rules or a statistical correlation engine to determine relationships between various event log entries. The tool gathers log and event data created by host systems, applications, and security devices, such as firewalls and antivirus filters, across the organization’s infrastructure, centralizing this data on one platform.
SIEM tools can identify and organize the correlated data into various categories, such as malware activity, successful and failed logins, and other malicious activities. After identifying potential security issues, SIEM tools generate alerts. Organizations can predefine rules to set alerts as high or low priority.
Advanced SIEM solutions extend their functionality to include security orchestration, automation and response (SOAR), and user and entity behavior analytics (UEBA).
SAST
Static application security testing (SAST) is a white-box testing method that analyzes application source code to find security vulnerabilities and weaknesses that can open the application to attacks. SAST tools analyze an inactive application by examining its source code, binaries, and byte code for design and coding flaws.
Software developers use SAST to identify and remediate flaws in application source code during the early phases of the software development life cycle (SDLC) before deploying to production. SAST scans in these phases are possible because they do not require a running application or deployed code.
By running SAST early in the SDLC, developers get real-time feedback. This information helps resolve code issues before passing it to more advanced phases of the SDLC. However, developers must run SAST regularly to ensure they catch vulnerabilities whenever the application undergoes a new build or code is released or checked.
XDR
Extended detection and response (XDR) is a SaaS-based security threat detection and incident response tool that integrates several security products natively and unifies all licensed components into one security operations system. XDR provides security operations with real-time actionable threat information for faster outcomes.
This vendor-specific tool enables organizations to achieve a holistic and more straightforward view of security threats across the entire technology landscape. XDR products help improve security operations productivity by extending detection and response functionalities. The tool ingests and distills several telemetry streams, unifying visibility and controls across all endpoints, clouds, and networks.
By analyzing threat vectors, including TTPs, XDR eliminates the need for custom-made point solutions, making complex security operations functionalities more accessible to security teams. It also removes detection and investigation cycles, offering a threat-centric context to facilitate quicker incident response.
Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR)
DFIR is the practice of identifying, investigating, containing, and remediating cyberattacks. It can also provide evidence for legal prosecution related to cyberattacks and other digital investigations. DFIR utilizes two disciplines:
- Incident response – works to collect and analyze data to investigate digital assets. The goal of this investigation is to support responses to security events. It includes not only investigations but also response steps like containment and recovery.
- Digital forensics – this sub-field of forensic science involves collecting, analyzing, and presenting digital evidence, such as user activity and system data. It helps determine what occurred on specific network devices, tablets, phones, and computer systems. Digital forensics supports various investigations, such as internal company investigations, regulatory investigations, criminal activities, and litigations.
Digital forensics involves collecting and investigating data primarily to determine a narrative of what has already occurred. Incident response investigations are initiated mainly to contain and recover from a security incident. Both can utilize the same procedures and tools, and events that occur during incident response might be shared during future litigation.
Share this article
About the Author
Waqas is a cybersecurity journalist and writer who has a knack for writing technology and online privacy-focused articles. He strives to help achieve a secure online environment and is skilled in writing topics related to cybersecurity, AI, DevOps, Cloud security, and a lot more. As seen in: Computer.org, Nordic APIs, Infosecinstitute.com, Tripwire.com, and VentureBeat.
More from Iam WaqasRelated Posts
19 Best Vulnerability Management Software or Tools in 2024
KEY TAKEAWAYS Vulnerability management tools scan and detect weaknesses within the network that hac...
How to Detect, Identify and Fix Packet Loss with Best Tools
KEY TAKEAWAYS Packet loss reduces the speed and amount of data that flows through the network. This ...
15 Best Network Security Software – Top Pick Of Organizations
KEY TAKEAWAYS Network security software keeps the data secure and blocks malicious or potentially vu...
15 Best Virtual Machine Software for Windows in 2024
KEY TAKEAWAYS Virtual machine software is a vital tool for developers to deploy VM software to test ...
What is Software Deployment: Risks and Best Practices
KEY TAKEAWAYS Software deployment is facing various security risks amidst the advancements in the in...
Building Encryption into the Network Fabric with SASE
A network fabric is a mesh of connections between network devices such as access points, switches, a...
