Incident Response Team: Definition and How to Build One?

An Incident Response Team (IRT) is crucial for defending against cybersecurity threats. Learn what an IRT does, why it’s essential, and how to build an effective team to protect your organization

Imagine this scene: you arrive at work and hear that your systems have gone offline. Your recovery can get compromised if you don’t have a reliable incident response team.

Disasters can happen anytime; designing an identity-focused incident response playbook can help prevent data breaches.

Every organization with a large collection of cyber assets should consider investing in an incident response team (IRT). This is usually the first line of defense against cybersecurity threats in your organization and can be the difference between a threat that is nipped in the bud and a full-blown data breach.

So how can one go about building a solid IRT for their organization? This post will explain what an IRT is, why you need one, and how to build the right IRT for your organization.

What Is an Incident Response Team?

An incident response team (IRT) is a group of individuals within the IT department responsible for preparing for and responding to cybersecurity threats. An incident response team designs the organization’s cybersecurity architecture, trains staff on how to spot potential threats, and monitors the organization’s network for abnormalities.

So, why do I need an IRT?

In today’s ever-evolving cybersecurity landscape, threats are becoming more sophisticated and more common by the day. IRTs include specialists designed to find vulnerabilities in your network and work toward mitigating them. A good incident response team helps you secure sensitive data, thereby minimizing costs and ensuring that your organization’s cybersecurity policies abide by government regulations. This includes setting up access control to ensure only the right people can get to it and setting up firewalls and other intrusion prevention systems (IPSs) to keep bad actors out of the network. According to UpGuard, the average data breach cost companies about $4.35 million in 2023. This includes lost data, fines incurred, and potential legal fees. Having an IRT allows organizations to avoid these losses by stopping the breaches before they happen.

Data breaches are also a leading cause of loss of customer trust, with as many as 65% of customers losing trust in an organization after a data breach. Forward-facing organizations understand that their IRT is not only a cybersecurity team, but a crucial tool for maintaining customer satisfaction. Additionally, in several places, government regulations also mandate strict adherence to cybersecurity policies for many industries, including healthcare and banking. It is the responsibility of the incident response team to ensure that these regulations are met, thus avoiding potential consequences.

What Does an Incident Response Team Do?

An incident response team has a host of responsibilities within the IT department.

The IRT’s foremost duties are to prepare for threats and monitor the organization’s network. Preparation includes assessing your current network for vulnerabilities, and, using the information at hand, making a plan of action for potential threats.

The team is also responsible for monitoring the network and scanning for abnormalities. This is usually done using automated tools like SentinelOne. Such tools automatically monitor your organization’s network, including all connected devices, servers, and even cloud connections, 24/7. Whenever unusual activity is detected, they alert the IRT so they can enact their pre-determined plans.

Incident response teams set up firewalls, access controls, antiviruses, and other IPSs to keep intruders out of the system, but they are also responsible for training non-IT-related staff on best practices for their own cybersecurity. Although viruses are a popular attack vector, most data breaches occur when an organization’s staff knowingly or unknowingly gives information to attackers through phishing or other types of social engineering.

Incident Response Team Roles and Responsibilities

Incident response teams have the following roles and responsibilities:

• Design proactive plans to respond to incidents in real-time
• Track and resolve system vulnerabilities
• IRT members focus on implementing the best incident response policies and practices
• They also classify incidents and decide how to handle them
• IRT members establish clear client communications, categorize incidents, and draft up-to-date training programs for professionals that prepare them for future cyber incidents.

Structure of an Incident Response Team and Roles

As Zenduty puts it, an IRT “requires a well-defined structure with individuals holding specific roles and responsibilities.” They outline four key roles within the IRT:

• The incident manager is essentially the manager of the IRT. They are the glue that holds the team together, in charge of coordinating the response to events, disseminating information around the team, and allocating resources within the team. It is also their job to ensure that the incident response plan is followed appropriately and, if not, dictate the deviations to be made.
• The communications lead is the spokesperson for the IRT. They are in charge of communication between the IRT and its various stakeholders. The communication lead is tasked with providing timely communication regarding incidents and answering questions from various stakeholders, including those outside the organization.
• The technical lead gets down to the nitty-gritty. This is the IT personnel (or team of personnel) in charge of diagnosing the root cause of incidents and implementing the steps to contain them. This group usually includes forensic specialists who are responsible for analyzing incidents and finding out why they happened. The technical team may also include security analysts whose job is to secure and monitor the network for abnormalities. They choose the monitoring software and conduct penetration testing to find out how best to secure the network.
• The legal counsel is meant to offer professional guidance regarding the legal ramifications of the IRT’s actions. Since IRTs deal with sensitive customer data, they must abide by a host of regulations. The legal counsel is tasked with ensuring that the IRT complies with these regulations.

How an Incident Response Team Works?

1. Preparation

This phase involves assessing your network for vulnerabilities. The team must make a plan of action for the various threats to the system and create a communication strategy for communication within themselves and to stakeholders.

This is also the phase where the IRT sets up its monitoring software and ensures that they are in compliance with data privacy laws.

2. Detection and identification

Using the pre-established monitoring tools, the team identifies network abnormalities. Once the cybersecurity specialists detect the problem, they pass the information on to the technical lead, eliminate or contain the issue, and alert the wider organization if necessary.

3. Containment and Eradication

Containment will prevent the incident from getting worse and quarantine threats. The eradication phase will focus on removing threats from affected systems.

4. Recovery and Post-Incident Activities

Recovery focuses on recovering data after incidents, minimizing losses, and collecting evidence. It also includes exercising an organization’s disaster recovery capabilities. Post-incident activities include updating business continuity plans and hosting meetings with stakeholders to report and discuss the lessons learned.

How to Build an Incident Response Team?

Not every IRT is built the same. Different organizations must assess their unique needs to determine how to allocate resources when making their team. At times, you may wish to hire external contractors to handle some of the responsibilities for you. Other times, you may wish to build your team entirely in-house. That said, some core concepts will be present across every IRT.

Team

Every IRT must have a solid technical team. The technical team is the backbone on which the rest of your IRT is built and should include individuals with cybersecurity expertise. The incident manager may also be a member of the technical team. In smaller organizations, the technical team may consist of a single individual who is also the incident manager. Other times, the incident response team may consist of a handful of people acting as both security members and forensic analysts. Forensic analysts may be external contractors.

Equipment

Furthermore, you must invest in the right equipment. Using feedback from your team, you need to invest in monitoring tools, including security information and event management (SIEM) systems, intrusion prevention systems (IPSs), and intrusion detection systems (IDSs).

Some organizations build their monitoring tools from scratch, while others use third-party monitoring tools. Tools built from scratch may be harder to breach, but third-party tools take less time to implement, are less expensive to acquire, and have dedicated customer service for troubleshooting. When deciding on tools to use, consider the recommendations of your team as well as budgetary constraints.

Training

Sometimes, new IT technicians will need to be trained on the procedures within your organization. This is especially true if you use tools developed in-house. Your incident manager and/or technical lead should be in charge of recruiting and training new members of your IRT, and your communications lead (who may also be the incident manager in a small organization) should establish a chain of communication through which the team can pass around information. This includes using messaging software like Slack for the team.

Benefits of an Incident Response Team

A proper incident response team can save your company from data breaches, regulatory punishments, and legal fines.

IRTs swiftly identify, contain, and remove threats to your network. They also test for vulnerabilities so they know the vectors through which your organization will likely be attacked. This minimizes the number of incidents your company faces and reduces the damage they cause. By swiftly containing malware or alerting staff to phishing incidents, this reduces the number of people affected by them, thus minimizing data loss. The IRT should build cybersecurity awareness even among non-IT staff. This in turn builds the organization’s reputation.

IRTs also ensure compliance with industry regulations. This is crucial, as companies can be fined or sued if they do not abide by cybersecurity and data privacy regulations in their fields. A proper IRT, with the help of the legal counsel, avoids these problems by ensuring that the company abides by these regulations.

Incident response teams are also at the forefront of generating awareness about an organization’s cybersecurity. Being transparent to stakeholders about incidents (especially those handled well) builds trust in an organization, leading to higher customer retention.

Tips for Incident Response Team Members

Here are some excellent tips for all IRT members:

• The first step to being a good incident response team is to make sure you react to the threat as fast as possible. Even during intrusion, you can block the threat, but it’s just not enough to stop right there. It’s important to identify the root causes of threats and resolve those vulnerabilities or else more security gaps will be created. There’s also a chance that these gaps can cause new threats to arise after a while.
• It’s important to look beyond the initial symptoms in order to understand the full root causes of attacks. One great example is the case of the Sophos MDR team that responded to potential ransomware but realized that there was no evidence of it. When the team continued investigating, it discovered a historic banking trojan. It’s also important to identify compromised administrator accounts, remove several malicious files, and block attacker commands and C2 command-and-control communications.
• Complete visibility into your threat detection is crucial. Limited visibility into your cloud environments is a definite way to miss critical attacks. If you are dealing with hybrid cloud environments, you want to ensure that you collect the right quality data from a wide variety of sources and use the best tools, tactics, and procedures. You also need to reduce noise and alert fatigue for your organization. It’s important to apply context because although threat intelligence is key, the wrong kind of threat intelligence is something you don’t want.
• You want to pinpoint where your attack signals originate, the current stage of attacks, related events, and potential impact and future implications to the business. If your team is struggling with a lack of skilled resources to investigate and respond to incidents, you can hire external resources.
• There are many MDR services you can rely on to outsource your security operations and these are delivered usually by your team of security specialists. These services include threat hunting, real-time monitoring, incident response, and human-led investigations. When you combine security automation with human insight, you get the best possible results as incident response team members.

Examples of Incident Response Teams

Some examples of common incident response teams are:

• Computer Emergency Response Teams (CERT)
• Security Operations Centers (SOC)
• Security analysts

There are also specialists dedicated to data restoration and recovery efforts, documentation building, and the eradication of attackers’ presence post-system or network compromises.

Incident Response Teams: Your Organization’s Cyber Protectors

As you can see, incident response teams are a crucial aspect of your organization. Using a host of tools, they assess, monitor, and protect your network architecture to make sure that attackers, who are growing more creative by the day, cannot access your data. Their job is crucial and complicated, and when assembling your team, you must also consider whether you will be building your own tools or using third-party monitoring tools like SentinelOne. Book a demo with a SentinelOne expert today.

FAQs

What is an incident response team in cybersecurity?

An incident response team is a group of individuals within the cybersecurity department tasked with securing the organization’s network. They assess the network for vulnerabilities and work to fix those vulnerabilities. They also monitor the organization’s network and quickly eliminate new threats.

Who should be on your incident response team?

When building an IRT, you should consider your organization’s needs and resources. Your IRT may include a manager, a team of cybersecurity specialists, and a team of forensic analysts. However, it may also include just one or two people filling all of these roles. Where necessary, you may also need to invest in a communications manager to relay information to stakeholders, and legal counsel to advise the technical team.

You should also remember to invest in resources for these individuals, including monitoring tools and group communication apps.

What are the key responsibilities of the incident response team?

The key responsibilities of an IRT are to assess your organization’s network for vulnerabilities, protect your resources, and monitor the network. The team should be able to quickly respond to new threats and conduct penetration testing to determine possible attack vectors.