How security practitioners deal with incident response

A spate of high-profile security breaches and attacks means that security practitioners find themselves thinking a lot about incident response, according to a new SANS survey.

“Many small organizations think they are a less significant target to sophisticated attackers and are, therefore, safe from intrusion,” says SANS Analyst and author Alissa Torres. “As last week’s discovery of the loss of 1.2 billion usernames and passwords from 420,000 websites demonstrated, nothing could be farther from the truth.”

In fact, organizations of all sizes are facing incidents that require incident response capabilities. And unfortunately, only 9% of survey respondents labeled their incident response capabilities as very effective, and 26% were dissatisfied, citing lack or time to review and practice procedures (62%) and lack of budget (60%) as key impediments to effective response.

Jake Williams, SANS Analyst and incident response professional, adds, “Overall, organizations are not ready to handle their incident response requirements. Having a plan in place to address incidents, including delineation of what constitutes an incident, enables organizations to address issues when they do arise.”

Still, 43% of respondents did not have formalized incident response plans and 55% didn’t have formal incident response teams. Williams continues, “Both of these situations lead to disjointed approaches to managing and remediating incidents, resulting in delayed responses and more costly mitigation.”

Survey results point to automation and security information and event management integration tools as key means to improving incident response processes.

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