Lesson 7: Insider Threat Incident Response PDF

Lesson 7 Welcome to the final lesson in the insider threat module. This lesson will be on incident response. Okay, the objectives of this lesson around incident response will mean that by the end that you'll understand the role of incident response in managing insider threat incidents and how workin...

Lesson 7 Welcome to the final lesson in the insider threat module. This lesson will be on incident response. Okay, the objectives of this lesson around incident response will mean that by the end that you'll understand the role of incident response in managing insider threat incidents and how working alongside other incident teams such as the security operations centre will benefit your insider threat program. You'll also learn about working with non-technical stakeholders such as HR and legal when responding to incidents. You'll learn about setting up service agreements with stakeholders and other incident response teams and to develop an incident response plan specific to insider threats. And then finally you'll be able to evaluate and improve an incident response process in your organization based on lessons learned. Incident response or IR plays a pivotal role in the security architecture of modern organizations particularly in managing the complexities associated with insider threats. And insider threats unlike external attacks obviously come from within an organization but can involve not just employees but contractors, other business partners or third- party suppliers who may misuse their authorized access to harm your organization. In this lesson we'll explore the integral role of incident response in identifying mitigating and learning from insider threats. The definition of insider response is that it's a structured methodology for handling security breaches attacks and other threats to minimize the impact on the organization and prevent future occurrences. For insider threats this means detecting suspicious activities that might indicate malicious intent or negligent behavior by an individual inside the organization. And the core phases of incident response are number one preparation so developing policies tools and procedures to manage security incidents. Number two detection and analysis identifying and validating incidents through monitoring and surveillance technologies. Number three containment eradication and recovery stopping the threat removing it from the environment and restoring systems to normal operation. Number four is post-incident activity analyzing the incident to improve future response and prevent reoccurrence. Now the objectives of incident response are specific to insider threats because the primary objective when responding to insider threats include number one quick detection because rapid identification is obviously crucial since insiders already have legitimate access to your organization and they make their actions harder to detect than those of external hackers or attackers. Number two is damage limitation ensuring the actions of the insider do minimal harm to the organization's people assets and reputation. Number three is evidence preservation maintaining forensic evidence for any legal actions while respecting privacy laws and organizational policies. And number four systematic learning applying lessons learned to strengthen policies and technologies against future insider threats. There's also an impact assessment that is needed in insider threat incidents and impact assessment tools and techniques include number one user behavior analytics or UBA tools that analyze historical data to detect anomalies in user behavior which are often indicators of insider threat. Number two privileged access management or PAM systems that manage elevated access and monitor the actions of users with such access to prevent misuse. Number four is forensic analysis techniques used to uncover the root cause of an incident and determine the extent of the damage are required. Now the challenges in assessing impact are number one subtlety of the insider's actions. Insiders actions are often not blatantly malicious making them difficult to distinguish from normal activities. There's also a complexity of motivations unlike external threats that are typically financially motivated insiders might be driven by a range of motivations including personal grievances or ideological beliefs complicating the response strategy. And key practices for effective incident response to insider threats are number one tailored incident response plans. Creating incident response plans that specifically address insider threats are really important because you need to recognize their unique nature and the different approaches required compared to external threats. Number two cross-departmental collaboration is an absolute must. Engaging stakeholders from IT, HR, legal and other relevant departments ensure a holistic response strategy. And then number three is regular training and simulations conducting training sessions and simulated insider threat scenarios prepare an incident response team and other relevant staff should the worst happen. Effective incident response to insider threat requires a deep understanding of the unique challenges posed by insiders and the implementation of specialized strategies to detect respond and learn from these incidents. So the role of incident response in managing insider threats is crucial in maintaining the integrity, the confidentiality and the availability of organizational resources. Managing insider threats effectively requires the collaboration not only of the technical teams such as security operations center and incident response teams but also non-technical stakeholders as well. So things like human resources, legal, executive management etc they play vital roles in the holistic management of insider threats. This slide we're going to explore the dynamics of working with these non-technical stakeholders in IR. So the key teams in incident response are number one the security operations center who obviously primarily focus on continuous monitoring and analysis of security alerts generated by the enterprise tools and your sim etc. The incident response team they specialize in managing the response to security incidences including insider threat. Your network operations center if you have one or not manages the organization's networks ensuring uptime and performance which is crucial in identifying anomalies that could indicate insider threat. The key non-technical stakeholders are human resources and they are essential in managing the employee life cycle from hiring through termination and they're pivotal in enforcing policies and understanding the context of insider behaviors. Then you've got your legal department they are crucial for ensuring compliance with laws and regulations both from an organizational standpoint and an employee standpoint. So particularly in the handling of investigations and the implications of insider threats. And then you've got your executive management which is either your EVPs or your C-suite and they are responsible for the strategic decisions funding for your incident response program and supporting policies that govern insider threat programs. So the roles and responsibilities of HR are policy enforcement they enforce all the policies that may deter insider threats such as acceptable use policies background checks etc. And they can also provide behavioral insights they provide insights into you know how the employees been behaving have they been put on a performance improvement plan might there be any potential stressors that the employee is undergoing at the moment that may actually cause them to become a risk. And then you have the legal department so they look at compliance and guidance and they ensure the organization's response to insider threat complies with legal standards. So it may be that what's happened with your insider requires you to report yourself to the regulatory authorities and that would be your legal team's responsibility to do so. And then executive management so they look at the resources that you're going to need for your insider threat management program and any executive management that does not take insider threat seriously is very very naive. They also approve the policies based on recommendations from the technical and non-technical teams as well. You've also got to look at communication strategies between the technical and the non- technical stakeholders. So you need to have regular briefings to keep all stakeholders informed particularly if there's going to be any updates or changes to policies any new threats or any ongoing incidences. And you also need to conduct either quarterly or annual training sessions and these must be joint training sessions of your entire incident response team including technical and non-technical stakeholders. And then you have incident response protocols so you need to establish clear protocols for how incidents should be reported, who they should be reported to and how things get escalated within the organization. Now the challenges that you might face in collaboration around insider threat are or come from things like differing perspectives. Perhaps non-technical stakeholders may have different priorities such as employee privacy where HR is concerned or legal implications where legal is concerned which can conflict with security measures. There also might be communication barriers so technical jargon and complex security concepts can hinder effective communication and understanding. And then you have response timeliness so coordination between multiple departments can delay responses to insider threats and you need speed to be crucial when you're dealing with an insider threat issue. When it comes to things like strategies for effective collaboration the IR plans include roles and responsibilities for all stakeholders so they should be identified in your plan what is everyone's role and how will you coordinate that approach. You need to look at your cross-functional teams as well so that includes the technical and non-technical threat mitigation people and you need to do regular simulations and drills as well. Effective incident response to threats often extends beyond the immediate technical response to involve a broader coordination with various organizational stakeholders and establishing clear service agreements is essential to define roles expectations and protocols. So it may be that if you send an email or contact HR you expect a response within 30 minutes as part of your service level agreements and you would define those for each of the teams that you have involved in this. And service agreements they formalize the expectations so if people fall short then it becomes a procedural issue that's dealt with by either senior management or legal. And they ensure that everybody knows their roles and the communication procedures in advance because it's often the case if you can prove that you had a robust policy practice and procedure when an incident response happens because there's an insider issue it can often be a mitigating factor where you're not held legally liable. So you need to look at the scope of services, you need to look at roles and responsibilities and but most importantly you need to look at performance metrics. You need to establish benchmarks for response times and the quality of service which will help in measuring the effectiveness of the response. You need to look at communication protocols, how you're going to share information across teams and how that information is going to be timely and accurately shared and acted upon. Then there's steps to setting up the service agreements. So obviously you should have by now identified your key stakeholders and you should have identified mutual understandings so you should have held meetings with them to understand what the common strategy is. You need to have a draft and review so the draft agreement will have input from all the relevant parties followed by a thorough review to ensure clarity and completeness. And then you need to formalize and implement so it's all very well having a policy that sits gathering dust on the shelf but you need to make sure that you are working to that policy and that you are training to that policy. Now the challenges in implementing service agreements come from things like alignment of interest so different departments have different priorities, might be conflicting priorities or they might even have resource constraints. There's an issue with complexity of agreements so crafting agreements that are detailed yet flexible enough to cover scenarios can be challenging giving everyone's needs and desires. But then there needs to be maintenance and updates so it's fine having a policy but if you never update that policy based on what is happening in your organization then it's pretty useless. The other thing that you need to have is clear escalation paths so how do you handle disagreements or exceptions effectively. It might be that you had an insider threat who had a disability and therefore because of their disability it made them more likely to act in a way that was detrimental to the organization without thinking of the consequences. And so these are things that you need to look at when you're building your policy and you're creating your metrics. So after you've had or been unfortunate enough to have an insider threat situation or incidents, evaluating your response effectiveness will provide crucial insights that can be used to strengthen your security measures and response tactics going forward. Continuous improvement is crucial to help organizations adapt to evolving threats and changing business environments, particularly when you look at things post-COVID, work from home, remote working, etc. So the key areas of evaluation are response effectiveness. You need to analyze the timeliness, accuracy, and effectiveness of your business response to see how well you actually manage the incident or otherwise. You need to assess whether or not your resources that you allocated to the incident were adequate and used optimally. And then you need to look at stakeholder involvement and review the roles that people played in the incident and whether it was valuable to have them involved or it was a hindrance. So learning from lessons and gathering lessons are part of an after-action review or AAR, where you conduct structured debriefing sessions after each incident to discuss what happened, why it happened, and how well or otherwise it was handled. And then you need to do your metrics analysis to provide you with updated KPIs to quantitatively assess the incident response process and outcomes. Then you need to document the lessons because it might be that you actually move on from your company and somebody else takes your place and they have no knowledge of the actual incident that occurred. So compiling incident reports with timelines, actions taken, results, and recommendations for future responses are really important. In law enforcement, when an incident happens, a major incident happens, there is a senior officer who is appointed, and they keep a log of every decision that was taken as part of that incident. And that is something that is really valuable to do for insider threat investigations because sometimes these investigations will go to court. And it's important as well that you maintain a centralized repository of all the lessons learned for easy access and reference. When it comes to improvement, you need to update your response plans, you need to enhance your training programs, and it might be that you even need to do things like technology upgrades. Do you need to implement some software or some hardware that may prevent the incident from happening in the future? You might need to increase the automation of what you were trying to do to speed up response times, maybe that you need a dedicated or specific insider threat tool. You might need to look at how you can increase collaboration, increase executive buy-in, ensuring that they support you, they continue to fund your program, but in turn that you provide them with ROIs or returns on investment for anything that they're going to spend from the budget in terms of security investments for insider threat as well. So thank you for going through the insider threat lessons with us and this concludes our lesson plan.