Book Image

Incident Response in the Age of Cloud

By : Dr. Erdal Ozkaya
Book Image

Incident Response in the Age of Cloud

By: Dr. Erdal Ozkaya

Overview of this book

Cybercriminals are always in search of new methods to infiltrate systems. Quickly responding to an incident will help organizations minimize losses, decrease vulnerabilities, and rebuild services and processes. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, with most organizations gravitating towards remote working and cloud computing, this book uses frameworks such as MITRE ATT&CK® and the SANS IR model to assess security risks. The book begins by introducing you to the cybersecurity landscape and explaining why IR matters. You will understand the evolution of IR, current challenges, key metrics, and the composition of an IR team, along with an array of methods and tools used in an effective IR process. You will then learn how to apply these strategies, with discussions on incident alerting, handling, investigation, recovery, and reporting. Further, you will cover governing IR on multiple platforms and sharing cyber threat intelligence and the procedures involved in IR in the cloud. Finally, the book concludes with an “Ask the Experts” chapter wherein industry experts have provided their perspective on diverse topics in the IR sphere. By the end of this book, you should become proficient at building and applying IR strategies pre-emptively and confidently.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
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17
Index

Incident Response – Evolution and Current Challenges

As we learned in the previous chapter, Incident Response (IR) is the approach used to manage security incidents in order to reduce the damage to an organization and improve the recovery of affected services or functionalities. IR activities follow a plan, which is the set of directions that outline the response procedures and the roles of different team members. IR has become a necessity for organizations facing rising threat levels, and this chapter discusses its importance.

With the focus of this chapter being the evolution and then the challenges of IR, we'll begin by looking at how IR has evolved with threats and advancements in technology. We'll then look at the challenges that IR teams face today, especially with the tasks of assessing current levels of security in the organization, anticipating and protecting systems from future threats, being involved in legal processes relating to cyber-attacks, uniting the organization during crises, and integrating all security initiatives. We'll cover the following main topics:

  • The evolution of incident response
  • Challenges facing incident response
  • Why do we need incident response?

We'll begin by exploring some recent history, and how IR has evolved over time.