BLOG: Incident Response and Business Continuity – Preparing for the Worst with Risk Based Vulnerability Management

The growing dependence of businesses on technology has unsurprisingly led to an increased risk of cyberattacks and other incidents that can potentially disrupt operations. To mitigate the potential damage caused by such incidents, businesses must take a proactive approach to risk vulnerability management. This involves identifying potential risks, assessing their impact on operations, and implementing measures to mitigate those risks.

Cyber researchers have reported that by 2025, 45% of organisations worldwide will have experienced attacks on their software supply chains, this is a three-fold increase from 2021. Two critical components of risk vulnerability management are incident response and business continuity planning.

An incident response plan is a documented set of procedures that outlines how an organisation will respond to a cybersecurity incident or other disruptive event. The primary goal of an incident response plan is to minimise the impact of the incident and restore normal operations as quickly as possible.

What steps can businesses take to prepare for an incident?

• Identify potential threats: The first step in preparing for an incident is to identify potential threats. This could include everything from cyberattacks to natural disasters.
• Determine the impact: Once potential threats have been identified, businesses need to assess the potential impact of those threats. This includes considering the financial, reputational, and operational impact of a potential incident.
• Develop a response plan: With the potential threats and their impact in mind, businesses can develop an incident response plan. This plan should outline the procedures that will be followed in the event of an incident, including who will be responsible for what tasks.
• Employee training: An incident response plan is only effective if employees are trained to follow it. Businesses should conduct regular training sessions to ensure that all employees know what to do in the event of an incident.
• Test the plan: Businesses should regularly test their incident response plan to ensure that it works as intended. This could include tabletop exercises or simulated incidents.

Business Continuity

While incident response focuses on minimising the impact of an incident, business continuity planning is about ensuring that operations can continue in the face of an incident. Business continuity planning involves identifying critical business functions and implementing measures to ensure that those functions can continue in the event of an incident.

Steps that businesses can take to prepare for disruption to operations:

• Identify critical business functions: The first step in business continuity planning is to identify the critical business functions that must continue in the event of an incident. This could include everything from payroll processing to customer service.
• Determine recovery time objectives: Once critical business functions have been identified, businesses need to determine how quickly those functions must be restored. This is known as the recovery time objective.
• Develop a continuity plan: With critical business functions and the recovery time objective in mind, businesses can develop a continuity plan. This plan should outline the procedures that will be followed to ensure that critical business functions can continue in the event of an incident.
• Implement redundancy measures: To ensure that critical business functions can continue, businesses may need to implement redundancy measures. This could include backup systems, redundant data centres, or redundant communication channels.
• Test the plan: Businesses should regularly test their continuity plan to ensure that it works as intended. This could include simulated incidents or full-scale disaster recovery tests.

Incident response and business continuity planning are critical components of risk vulnerability management. By taking a proactive approach to these components, businesses can minimise the impact of incidents and ensure that critical business functions can continue in the event of a disruption to operations. Businesses need to prepare for the worst and ensure that they can recover quickly from any incident.

We have developed the Orpheus Vulnerability Severity Score (OVSS), which assigns a score to every CVE using cyber threat intelligence and Machine Learning. This helps organisations filter vulnerabilities by severity and prioritise which ones to patch first. The use of risk-based CVE management and prioritising vulnerabilities is a sign of organisational maturity and effective use of resources and budget. Additionally, Orpheus’ proprietary Machine Learning predicts which vulnerabilities are likely to be exploited in the future, enabling organisations to patch them before attackers can exploit them. This helps organisations proactively manage risks and prevent them from happening.

If you want to learn more about how Orpheus Cyber can help protect your organisation by providing risk-based vulnerability management solutions and incident response planning, click here to take action now.