Incident Response Management

Ensuring digital service availability during and after cyber-attacks is a core cybersecurity requirement, and organizations should assume they will eventually be attacked. Company size does not meaningfully reduce the likelihood of being targeted, and incidents such as ransomware, malware infections, or hijacked privileged accounts can halt operations, trigger major data breaches, and threaten business survival through reputational damage, lost revenue, and regulatory penalties. Because worst-case scenarios are plausible, organizations need a concrete incident response plan and an operating structure designed to minimize impact and speed recovery.

Many organizations overinvest in overlapping preventive tools while underinvesting in detection and incident readiness. Survey data highlights this imbalance: most organizations prioritize prevention, fewer build compromise detection, and only a small minority establish formal Incident Response Management (IRM). The overall cybersecurity lifecycle spans risk identification and prioritization (within corporate risk management), prevention via patching and frontline controls, detection through SOC monitoring and telemetry analysis (supported by EDR/NDR, SIEM, and SOAR, including ML-based models), and finally the Respond & Recover phase owned by IRM and Business Continuity teams.

IRM is presented as a seven-step process triggered when the SOC verifies an incident. Effective response requires predefined roles, contact paths, and access to logs, systems, and system owners. Containment and eradication depend on appropriate privileges, ideally provisioned through Privileged Access Management, and may require pre-arranged support from external experts or government agencies. Restoration depends on backups, data protection strategies, and written service-specific recovery runbooks. Communication planning is treated as essential: organizations should pre-authorize spokespersons, prepare templates, run exercises, and meet regulatory reporting obligations. The final review phase turns lessons learned into concrete preventive improvements.

• Ninety percent of companies invest in preventive measures such as network security and anti-malware.
• Fifty-five percent of organizations invest in compromise detection capabilities such as user activity monitoring and regular health checks.
• Only one in eight companies have invested in a formal Incident Response Management plan.
• Ransomware can encrypt or destroy information objects and prevent use of critical data.
• Paying a ransom can still fail to restore file access because decryption processes sometimes do not work.
• Destructive wiper malware can erase data without demanding a ransom and leave no recovery path if backups do not exist.
• An attack on infrastructure can make digital services or customer portals unavailable and directly block revenue generation.
• A SOC monitors logs and network activity to identify suspicious behavior that frontline tools may miss.
• EDR, NDR, SIEM, and SOAR solutions can use machine-learning-based models to analyze suspicious information for maliciousness.
• Data breach incidents involving leaked customer data can require notification to the relevant data protection supervisory authority depending on the country.

• “Ensuring the availability of digital services in the event of a cyber-attack is a fundamental part of a company’s cybersecurity approach.”
• “Organizations need to prepare for being the victim of an attack.”
• “The chance of being hacked is significantly higher than in years previous, with the size of the company having little to no influence on the probability of being targeted.”
• “For such worst-case scenarios, a concrete plan and organizational structure must be defined, to ensure that the impact of the attack and the harm to the company can be minimized.”
• “Preparation is a process.”
• “The main goal of IRM is to mitigate the effects of the attack or the incident.”
• “When security incidents are verified, SOC analysts hand it over to Incident Response Management and Business Continuity Management teams, where the ‘Respond & Recover’ phase begins.”
• “Internal and external communication plans are crucial parts of IRM.”
• “It is prudent to develop communication templates for various data breach scenarios that can be used, and also have IRM practice exercises covering both internal and external communications.”
• “It must be understood what went poorly and what went well.”