Overview
The most important thing for you is to run your business smoothly without any distractions. The threat of cyber attack is ever looming on the horizon for any business organization or personal endeavors. Though regular vulnerability assessments and monitoring security systems is a surefire way to prevent any attacks, sometimes breaches do occur. If any system is under cyber-attack, you need people who have a clear understanding of the situation to control and mitigate the damages of the occurred breach. 
SECUPENT's Incident Response service team has practical experience handling and managing even the most complex and critical security breaches. Our skilled experts will effectively accelerate your incident investigation, containment of the breach, reduce recovery time, and quickly identify the extent of the breach and amount of data stolen. Out teams will work closely with you through every stage of the incident response from analysis of the indent to recovery and remediation of the breach.
Why Do You Need An Incident Response
1. Protect Your Reputation & Customer Trust: Researches conducted by IDC have found that almost 80% of the clients and consumers will think of alternatives if directly affected by data breach. A breach will surely make customers lose their trust as they would not their assets get into wrong hands. Many big companies have seen a catastrophic stock price dips because of data breaches like Sony, Yahoo, Target and many more.
2. Protect Your Data: Seasoned and well-resourced hackers are capable of infiltrating into any organization breaching the security system. Once they have access inside the network, they have the potential to cause severe damage by stealing and exposing sensitive data. Protecting personal and professional data is of great importance. In the wrong hands, these data are used for ransom by hackers using ransomware. They can also make confidential information go public which causes huge proprietary damage for the breached business.
3. Protect Your Monetary Health: According to the Ponemon Institute's Cost of Data Breach Study, the average cost of a data breach is about 3.86 million. Not only the big companies are hugely affected by a data breach, but most of the mid to small size businesses are also often targeted by an attacker as most of these organizations don't have properly structured security systems. The repercussions of these breaches can be devastating to small and mid-level businesses also in fact, more than 60% of the businesses of small to mid-size can't continue to run more than six months after struck by a breach.
4. Preventive Detective Security Measures Are No Longer Full-Proof: Though preventive measures have been a long-running method to uphold a better security posture, times are changing fast. As the technology is advancing every day, preventive and detection measures are not hundred percent reliable. An incident will get past the security system unnoticed no matter how many security solutions are stationed. Incidents are much like risks, which can never be truly eliminated. The faster an incident or data breach has been detected, the less likely it is to pose a significant threat to your reputational and financial stability and bring your business operations to a halt.
Benefits Of Incident Response
1. Mitigate the Damage after a Security Breach: A security breach can bring devastating consequences to organizations. Financial loss, reputational loss, data loss, operational downtime are only some of them. Having a proper incident response can help organizations repair the damage quickly and avoid long periods of downtime.
2. Lower Investigation Costs: After a breach has occurred, contacting a well experienced and proper incident response service provider can help you reduce your investigation cost by a large margin. An experienced team will find identify the incident and locate the attacker more efficiently which will take less time. And the sooner you secure your data, the better it is for your organization.
3. Reduce Operational Downtime: Contacting an incident response team as soon as a breach occurs helps to cut down the downtime due to the incident. Which helps to bring your business back on track and fully operational as soon as possible.
4. Create Remediation and System Hardening Strategies: After a threat has been contaminated and eradicated by the Incident response team, a remediation plan is created to repair the damages and restore lost data. A long term plan is created to bolster the security from future attacks which may include reconfiguration of the systems, changing application frameworks and architecture, changing or patching hardware and even overhauling the existing systems for better protection.
Why SECUPENT
SECUPENT, a multiple award-winning Cyber security company, which is recognized as a consecutively award receiving company. The best way to stop a hacker is to think and act like a hacker. Our people who are more passionate, loyal, committed and experienced in security as pen testers, they are good people who know all about the bad things just like an attacker. In short, they are highly skilled ethical hackers and are always one step ahead of malicious attackers. We care about our clients because trust and commitment hold the key factor in every business relationship. We pride ourselves on going above and beyond the boundaries of typical customer service to truly exceed the expectations of those we work with. As their partners, we work hard to help them succeed since the only true measure of our success is their own. SECUPENT's expert incident response team has experience with over hundreds of cases on security breaches. A broad knowledge gives our responders leverage over the attackers. Our responders use the latest digital forensic techniques and reverse engineering to locate and comprehend the source and type of attack and also recover the exposed data. Our experts use their vast intelligence on threat analysis, forensics, and malware analysis to tackle threats of all shapes and sizes. We reduce the recovery time, cost and damage through our structural and strategic method.
Our Methodology
We at SECUPENT handle each incident response plan in a 5 step approach and methodology. These 5 steps of our methodology are:
1. Identify Assets: The first step of any incident response plan is to identify the threat and affected assets. An incident can happen any time and can affect anyone or many components of your organization's network system such as computers, networks or web application. The first task at hands for our incident response team is to locate and identify the threat and the assets affected. Any asset can be affected by one more threats or one threat an affect multiple assets at the same time. To find the affected assets and threats, our team will conduct some investigation which includes but is not limited to, documenting existing security infrastructure, measuring the threat landscape, review the scope of existing security measure, and examine the operational process.
2. Protecting your assets: The second step after identifying the threats and affected assets is to protect the assets from further damage. Once our team has learned about the magnitude and scope of the incident, they will contain the breach immediately to mitigate the damage and further spread. This may be done in several ways. We can either isolate, shut down or keep the affected assets operational under monitoring according to the severity and magnitude of the incident. Multiple affected assets might have multiple ways to contain the breach. For example, if a website has been affected, the first task to do is to launch the backup and shut down the affected website. Similarly, if one or multiple computers have been affected by malware, they are to be disconnected from the internet immediately.
3. Detect incidents: After identifying and containing the assets and incidents, it's time for the real investigation to start. After the affected assets identified, we will thoroughly investigate incident in details such as the origin of the attack, what type of attack is was(malware, SQL injection, DDoS attack, phishing etc. ) , the impact of the attack on the organization, the intention behind it, how the attacker used a weakness in the security measure to get inside, the type of attack and it's structure, severity, and magnitude of the attack, the types of data accessed and the amount of data exposed and find the source of the attack. A systematic investigation through the internal and external storage, real-time memory, system logs, network devices log, and other essential data is conducted to detect the incident and the impact of the incident.
4. Respond With A Plan: After detecting the incident and assessing the whole situation and taking each asset and amount of data exposed, we will create a response plan. This plan will contain, a list of affected assets and how much data has unauthorized access, how to recover from the incident, how to remove vulnerabilities from the assets, which threat should be prioritized more, remove any kind of backdoors which hackers can use to cause future incidents, perform all the required procedures to eradicate the incident, how to recover the lost data and restore regular operations.
5. Recover Operations: After a response plan is created, it is set into motion. A restoration process will be applied to bring back the regular operation of the organization. This will include, determining how to bring all the systems back to full operation, verifying each and every assets' integrity and their security strength. Defining a prioritized list of actions to undertake for a speedy recovery. We'll also document the incident and apply measures to fortify the security posture and make necessary improvements so that the organization is prepared for any kind of future incident
Not taking proper steps due to poor planning and misunderstanding the scope of the incident will lead to not be able to resolve the incident in time which can make the situations even dire. So any organization should always look for an experienced team who are well prepared and experienced to tackle any kind of incident
Deliverables
After conducting an incident response, we will provide you with the full detailed summary which will include:
1. An executive summary containing the detailed investigating process.
2. List of affected systems, networks, user credentials, and applications.
3. List of malicious software and exploited vulnerabilities used to breach your system.
4. A detailed process of containment and eradication process.
5. Strategic recommendations to bolster your organization's security system to prevent future breaches.
Types of incidents
According to the 2019 Official Annual Cybercrime Report by Cybersecurity Ventures, cybercrime is the greatest threat to any company in the world. Cybercrimes will cost almost 6 trillion US Dollars by the year 2021. This is a 3 trillion increase in just 6 years. Wealth lost due to Cybercrime is now one of the largest economic disasters in the world. With exploits and vulnerabilities emerging every day, cybercrimes are now at an all-time high. Given below are some of the sectors which are targeted by the cyber attackers.
Financial crimes: Cyber financial crimes are now among the top 5 most reported crimes. Cyber financial crimes are now an ever-looming threat to everyone and every organization and companies small or large. Financial crimes committed over the internet have a major impact on the financial, economic and healthcare sectors. It affects everyone from an individual to companies, business organizations, and even countries. Every day, countless people are getting their credit cards and bank accounts hacked by the cybercriminals. Business organizations are getting breached by cyber attackers every day and losing millions of dollars. They are hacking their way in to create fake invoices, commit tender frauds, scamming to obtain financial information and using those to meet their needs. Hackers use phishing, vishing, malware, spear fishing to get personal and financial information. They can also use keyloggers, hacked cameras, ATM card hacks to steal information. The largest bank heist in history was the 2016's cyber attack that attempted to steal almost 1 Billion USD from Bangladesh’s central bank and managed to get 81 million. A group of Russian-based hackers managed to steal almost 650 million pounds from various banks. They gained access to the banks by using malware and gathered personal data of bank officials.
Intellectual Property Theft: As the world and technology are ever-changing, cybercriminals are trying to find or create any kind of opportunity to create a mess. Cyber crimes are increasing day by day and cyber theft of intellectual property is one of them. Intellectual property on in short IP means copyrights, patents, trade secrets etc. Seasoned hackers are targeting business companies and personal websites to steal their hard worked IPs and creating huge financial distress for them. While financial information such as credit card details and other personally identifiable information are more frequently targeted by hackers, IP theft issues are becoming a large concern for small and large business organizations and as well as aspiring entrepreneurs. Many people lose their deserved pay for hours of dedication and work due to IP theft. In 2013, the software giant Adobe announced they had experienced a cyber IP theft of almost 40 million active accounts. In 2014, the entertainment mammoths SONY pictures had their systems hacked. The hacker group released confidential data which included unreleased SONY films, e-mails, personal information of employees and financial information. 2013 also saw the hack of online superstore TARGET, in which almost 110 million people got their personal data hijacked including 40 million banking and personal data. In March of 2018, 144 US universities, 176 universities from other countries, 47 private companies and other organizations such as the UN, US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission how a total of almost 3 billion dollars damages in intellectual properties. No matter how big or small you are, hackers will stop at nothing to infiltrate and access valuable information.
Personal Identifiable Information: Any information that can be used to identify, locate or communicate with an individual person is called considered as Personal Identifiable Information or PII. These may include but not limited to: name, address, telephone number, e-mail address, social security number or any kind of identification number. In short, any data which can be used to identify a specific person is personally identifiable information. This information is often targeted by hackers to cause serious harm to an individual's monetary health or reputation.
Destructive Attacks: Hackers often attack to inflict damage to personal and business organizations. This may be done to disrupt the workflow of an individual company or to damage the reputation. The most used destructive attack is Denial of Service (DoS) attacks. This attack aims to render a machine or server useless and inaccessible by the intended users. This is done by flooding the traffic of the targeted machine or network with a large number of requests. Many financial websites or e-commerce sites get heavily affected by these types of attacks as their customer traffic comes to a halt.
Insider Threats: Any malicious attack committed on the network or a computer system by someone who has authorized access to internal systems. These types of attacks are more destructive as the attacker is familiar with your systems' or network's internal architecture and protocols. Also, no one expects inside attacks and focuses more on the external aspects of cyber attacks. These attacks can include, stealing and exposing sensitive data, reduce system availability drastically by overloading system traffic, overloading system and network storage and many more destructive operations.
Defamation: Sometimes attackers would target influential people or a person of interest to sink their reputation in society. This is done for various reasons such as blackmailing, extortion, personal gain or just to harass them. Malicious hackers would steal their personal and security information and use it to cause harm to them. Many influential people in the world consisting of successful businessmen, sports personality, actors are often targeted by hackers.
Protected Health Information: Proper healthcare is a fundamental right for every person. Every Government and private healthcare system have their own medical record which they use to identify and support an individual patient. This information is confidential as they contain personal information of millions of people and falls under the jurisdiction of the law. Malicious attackers will target these to steal valuable and sensitive data to inflict harm on individual people. For example, attackers may use one's personal and medical data to blackmail him to do criminal activities.
Protected Government Information: Every Government has classified and top secret information which is not accessible by everyone as they can be used to cause serious damage or can be a matter of national security if publicly available. These may include government plans, blueprints, information, future endeavors, classified military information etc. Hackers target government officials to get into national grid to steal this classified information and use them to cause chaos. They sometimes sell these classified secrets to other countries which heavily increases the risk of a security compromise of a country.