Incident Response Cycle
An incident response cycle is a well-structured management approach that is aimed towards addressing the issues that arise after a cyber-attack of a security breach. The primary objective of this cycle is to establish effective management measures of an incident in a way that the recovery time and costs are reduced while the extent of the damage is also mitigated. There is a specific team, the Computer Security Incident Response Team (CSIRT), which is tasked with the mandate of practicing incident response activities (Wara & Singh, 2015). The team also includes other members such as legal, public relations, and human resource representatives. In a nutshell, incident response is based on the practice of planning ahead while establishing a working management plan prior to it being necessary.
Incident response is not a single action but a process that involves four phases. These phases are; preparation, analysis and detection, recovery, and post-incident activity. At the preparation phase, it is essential for the involved personnel to identify the assets that have to be protected no matter what while accessing and evaluating data from previous incidents to create a substantial plan. At the analysis phase, data is acquired from people, IDPS, and SIEM, among other avenues with the aim of using indicators to locate incidents (Wara & Singh, 2015). After the incidents have been located, the attack vector is classified as well as the vulnerabilities being exploited. With information about the scope of the incident, the third phase in implemented where actions are taken to minimize further damage such as blocking IPs. The fourth phase entails the newly adopted procedural changes from the lessons learnt.
I think none of the phases is more important than the other. The reason being that incident response requires a comprehensive case management approach that would facilitate the determination of the root cause of a problem while also developing effective strategies to prevent future attacks.
References
Wara, Y. M., & Singh, D. (2015). A guide to establishing computer security incident response team (CSIRT) for national research and education network (NREN). African Journal of Computing & ICT, 8(2), 1-8.
