A Complete Guide to Major Incident Management
02.09.2022
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Imagine a nightmare where you are in a dark tunnel and every minute without reaching the light costs a fortune. You try everything to find the exit, but there is nothing you can do.
The incarnation of these nightmares is called “Major Incidents” in the cyber security field.
These nightmares are likely to become a reality for managers of many organizations today, where companies manage almost all their business processes with digital solutions.
These threats have the potential to completely obscure a company's future and raze its reputation to the ground.
Managing major incidents with traditional methods is a much more complicated process than you may imagine. You can get through these processes undamaged only if you build a reliable and solid safety posture and are prepared in advance.
This guide will help you understand what major incidents are and how to manage them effectively.
Major incidents are types of incidents that are dangerous with high urgency and a significant business impact on the organization.
These incidents prevent organizations from functioning properly. As a result of these incidents, either customers become unable to access the products and services offered by the organization, or employees become unable to perform operations necessary for the execution of business processes.
In both cases, the impact of major incidents is devastating. Incidents will continue to wreak havoc on a company's financial structure and reputation until the cyber security team can deal with the problem.
It is almost impossible for organizations and institutions to prevent these incidents without a solid major incident management plan, as cyber attackers are constantly improving their strategy repertoire
Major incident management includes strategic planning activities to analyze every stage of the life cycle pattern of incidents and prevent their recurrence.
Organizations can prevent major incidents or circumvent them with minimal damage if major incident management processes are properly managed. In order to do this, members of cyber security teams working on major incidents should create a qualified action plan.
However, the actors in implementing a robust cyber security management plan are not just major incident response team members. All units of the company must take responsibility, so the organization can respond to major incidents as a whole. Only if the whole organization works in perfect harmony can the major incident management teams work in a continuous flow and make the necessary interventions.
In order for an organization to have a major incident response methodology that is efficient and effective, it should meet the following essential criteria:
Mains Steps in Major Incident Management
There are four basic steps to major incident response management, which may vary depending on the needs and possibilities of each organization.
If the IT team detects anomalies that match with definitions in the major incident response plan or an automated security tool, such as Logsign SIEM, flags unusual movements, the team analyzes the data and decides whether a major incident is occurring.
A major incident might have a number of characteristics, such as the variety of computers it impacts or the precise amount of loss it causes. So the definition of a major incident is company specific and varies in line with certain safety procedures.
The next step is informing all stakeholders, including partners, customers, or any related third-party entities about:
In addition to communication with stakeholders, coordination between teams is also essential. Therefore, all possible communication channels should be activated.
A major incident management team needs to be organized to carry out the major incident response plan.
Members of this team may be distributed across various departments or units. For this reason, the team must be brought together as quickly as possible, in a safe and comfortable physical or virtual assembly area. The faster the team gets together, the more likely they will benefit from early intervention.
When the whole team comes together, a communication infrastructure should be provided where they can exchange ideas and inform the rest of the team about the actions taken.
All tools and documents the team may need should be ready for use in the assembly area.
Major incidents can be resolved quickly if the team acts with the right equipment and a solid action plan. However, it should be kept in mind that child incidents, which refer to aftershock effects, can also create significant problems.
All units of the organization should act according to the plan throughout the resolution process of the major incident and manage interactions with stakeholders to ensure that the organization experiences minimal damage.
Once a major incident is resolved, it is essential to conduct a comprehensive review process that analyzes the factors causing the incident, the Achilles' heels of the organization, the impact of the incident, and how to prevent a recurrence of the incident.
All details of the major incident must be documented in an incident report during the review process. These documents can play a vital role in the incident resolution process, especially when the major incident management team changes.
At this stage, it is important to analyze the team's performance and get feedback from them on ways to improve the technological infrastructure or cyber security posture. This will help the team be more effective in responding to future major incidents.
Major incidents are lethal threats that can completely change a company's future. Manual methods often cause delays in responding to incidents.
A robust cyber security solution that can automate the incident response process can radically speed up your team’s reaction time. Thus, you can minimize financial losses due to delays.
The best-in-class, next-gen SIEM solution Logsign SIEM's Incident Life Cycle Management feature provides
If you want to improve your major incident management capabilities, request a live demo of Logsign SIEM. It will help you understand how Logsign SIEM can reshape and strengthen your cyber security posture.
