Incident Response Blueprint

In 1789, Benjamin Franklin famously stated that nothing is certain, “except death and taxes.” He clearly hadn’t predicted the modern reality of cyber attacks.

Today’s leaders, however, know that cyber attacks are inevitable. A 2014 survey of security professionals found that 43% of respondents had suffered a data breach in the past two years. As attacks evolve in agility and sophistication, the number of businesses impacted will continue to rise. From retail to financial services to pharmaceuticals, no industry is spared. In fact, chances are that your corporate network is under attack at this very moment.

A number of high profile companies recently suffered debilitating attacks, resulting in hundreds of millions of dollars in damages, from the destruction of IT infrastructure to crippled reputations. Cyber crime has become a profitable industry. Yet, few companies are armed with an Incident Response (IR) capability that can root out advanced threats in their environments and mitigate those impacts. Nearly half of companies who responded to a separate 2014 survey didn’t have an IR plan in place to deal with a data breach or cyber attack, and 58% believed that their IR plans were inadequate and needed to be improved. This failure to plan is a costly oversight, with conservative estimates for incident recovery ranging from $100,000 to $1.4 million.