As a business, finding ways to continuously strengthen your cybersecurity readiness can seem like a never-ending struggle. With so many new risks emerging every year, it can be challenging to know where and when to invest resources to ensure you’re able to protect your business from becoming another statistic.

Unfortunately, for some businesses, regardless of the security protocols they put in place, they may still become victim of some form of cyberattack. At these times, it may be challenging to know how to avoid the situation from happening again.

However, with the right incident analysis procedures in place, a great deal can be learned from past cybersecurity incidents to help businesses strengthen their defenses in the long term and avoid recurring issues.

Set the Stage for a Formal Review Process

The wake of a cybersecurity incident can be disorienting for businesses. However, once the dust settles, the first move should be to lay the groundwork for a formal incident review process.

One of the most important things to remember during this process is that it’s not about assigning blame for the issue. Instead, it’s about reconstructing the events that took place in an unbiased manner, while clearly identifying the what, where, when, and why of the incident.

Having a structured process in place to review the incident without focusing on who’s to blame helps ensure equal participation from all employees. It facilitates collaboration to learn from what happened and how it can be addressed.

Streamlining Your Incident Analysis Workflows

To learn the most from past security events, it’s essential to establish well-structured workflows for post-incident analysis. Using a clear framework that can be followed during analysis can help investigation teams take all the necessary steps to examine every relevant area, thereby maximizing the value of insights gained from the process.

Part of this framework should define everyone’s role during the investigation and any steps that need to be followed to ensure a successful review. This includes laying out exactly how data should be collected and how to properly tag any digital evidence found in system logs or across various systems and databases

Discover Root Cause Issues

All cybersecurity issues, regardless of their scope, have an initial starting point. An important part of post-incident analysis is identifying the root cause of these issues to gain a deeper understanding of where specific vulnerabilities may exist.

One way you can help identify root causes more efficiently is by practicing the “5 Whys” technique. In this scenario, you start with a discovered issue and ask why it happened. But instead of stopping the analyses after you find the source of the problem, you then ask the question “why” again.

The primary goal is to continue to dig deeper into each issue, asking why up to five times. This will remove the tendency to identify only surface-level problems in security and instead look for potentially hidden issues that can cause significant problems down the road if they’re not addressed.

Turn Extracted Data Into Actionable Improvements

Locating the root cause of a security breach isn’t where your post-incident analysis should end. Your ultimate goal should be to learn from everything that went right or wrong in your security protocols and turn your analysis data into actionable improvements in your business.

After you’ve identified the root causes of a breach, start building a list of all necessary changes to your operations or security protocols that need to be made. If multiple areas need to be addressed, create a priority list to help focus your in-house and third-party risk mitigation efforts.

Improve Your Threat Detection

There are many things you can learn when recovering from a recent cybersecurity event. For example, you’ll likely have a better understanding of how well your threat detection systems were able to identify network anomalies. Do they need to be updated to improve their accuracy and the speed at which they alert security teams?

Security incidents help to reveal exactly where your systems may be failing, even when they seem like they’re functioning the way they should. This information can provide you with highly valuable intelligence that can be used to update your security tools or push you to make new investments in new areas.

Enhance Business Security Controls

Having a strong security plan in place not only helps your response teams react more decisively during an attack, but it can also help prevent attacks from happening in the first place. Obtaining a detailed review of the event enables your team to pinpoint precisely where your defenses fell short and gives you a clear roadmap for strengthening those weak points.

This information can also extend into helping you follow critical compliance guidelines as you work to improve your cybersecurity posture. This can involve implementing strict access controls, data encryption, network segmentation, and more effective disaster recovery initiatives.

Understand and Address the Human Factor

As your teams start looking deeper into the reasons behind falling victim to a security breach, they’ll likely start to discover potential vulnerabilities that originate from simple human error. This could be due to using weak passwords, failing to update system security properly, or being careless when opening emails or downloading files. 

Since your employees are the front line of your organization, they are typically under constant attack, whether they know it or not. New threats can appear as phishing emails or other social engineering tactics designed to manipulate users’ actions and create new system vulnerabilities.

Helping your employees recognize where and when these incidents happen is vital. By designing cybersecurity awareness programs and training your employees on best security practices, you can significantly reduce your organization’s overall risk profile.

Build Better Defenses for Your Business

In a perfect world, your business will never need to worry about analyzing and learning from a successful cybersecurity breach. Unfortunately, however, no amount of safe planning and security processes can 100% guarantee you’ll never need to recover from some type of security incident.

However, in the event you ever need to deal with the aftermath of a security incident, by following the guidelines discussed, you’ll be able to extract valuable insights that can help you to strengthen your business moving forward.

Author Bio:

Nazy Fouladirad is President and COO of Tevora, a global leading cybersecurity consultancy. She has dedicated her career to creating a more secure business and online environment for organizations across the country and world. She is passionate about serving her community and acts as a board member for a local nonprofit organization.