NIST incident response template

Posted by alvina on August 30th, 2019

NIST incident response template provides the best ways of responding to the incidents related to cybersecurity. Being aware of this will be quite beneficial to the organization. Though it is meant for large organizations, small businesses can also use it for their advantage. It provides support to the companies to reach others before an incident happens and accordingly establishes a plan for incident coordination.

The NIST incident response playbook will not be helpful for recovery of incidents in case of a power failure, natural disasters, or other such events. But such situations can also result in an impact on the security of important information, which makes it essential for you to be prepared for it. In the case of power issues, the SSDs become vulnerable. Another such incident is an employee taking away sensitive data when the cameras are offline. This makes it necessary to make an incident response plan along with a plan for incident prevention.

It is important to know about the tools needed for incident recovery. Some of these are incident response personnel contact list, encryption software to communicate internally as well as externally, tools for gathering evidence and safely storing them, accessibility to clean OS images, etc.

The NIST incident response framework will just provide you the guidelines but the process needs to be done by you. Thus, you have the option to change the guidelines as per your requirements.

The incident response process involves three sections, namely:

1. Organizing and communicating

2. Handling the incident

3. Communicating or coordinating

In the first step, it is necessary to make sure that people in the organization are well aware of who has to be contacted in case of a breach of security. In the case of larger firms, media should be given the least information to safeguard the reputation of the firm and properly carry out the investigation. Then the jurisdictional issues can be prevented by ensuring a single point of contact with law enforcement agencies. It is essential to document the incident along with the custody chain for all proofs.

The second step in the NIST incident response process involves attacking the firm's network by hiring ethical hackers. This proactive step will help in spotting out the flaw so that preventive steps can be taken accordingly. You can initially identify a security incident by looking out for any unusual activity using the network logs, file integrity checker, anti-virus, etc. Spotting the malware, keyloggers, rootkits, backdoors, etc. is not an easy task and needs training. This will enable the users to identify any potential threat to prevent the situation from further worsening.

The third step of sharing the information and coordination is essential so that the Internet Service Providers (ISPs), partner organizations, and law enforcement bodies can come to know about the matter. Others will be able to avoid the same situation by tracking the attacker. The documentation made by law enforcement will help if the culprit is caught.