When to Engage Cyber Incident Response Experts: 7 Signs Your Team Needs Help
Incident response plans are common among all organizations. However, what is much rarer is the sufficient amount of expertise that would allow an organization to address all of its significant cyber incidents independently.
This is an important point.
While a security team can be proficient at dealing with all of the standard procedures like investigating suspicious events, isolating endpoints, and using playbooks, things can get much more complex for the organization when the attacker is persistent, has compromised privileged access, and/or has traversed various parts of the environment. Then it becomes logical to turn to cyber incident response experts.
The point is not to substitute the internal security team but to bring extra knowledge and capability when necessary.
1. The Incident Involves Privileged Account Compromise
The fact that an administrator account has been compromised makes the entire scenario different.
With the attackers having the privileges to disable security controls, create new accounts, access critical systems, and navigate through the network, all the while masquerading as valid users, there is an urgent need to know whether the account has been compromised, the extent of its use, and any other compromised credentials.
Inability by your team to determine such information can be helped out by external incident response experts.
2. You Suspect Ransomware or Data Exfiltration
A ransomware investigation is not merely limited to restoring access to compromised encrypted systems.
The team needs to find out how the attacker gained entry into the system, how long he or she stayed there, whether any credentials were compromised, which systems he or she accessed, and whether any information was moved out before encrypting the system.
CISA suggests keeping logs from network devices, hosts, and cloud services as this would help in triaging the security event as well as assessing its impact. When the available evidence is spread over multiple security solutions, a seasoned incident responder can assist in putting the pieces together.
3. Your Team Cannot Establish the Full Attack Timeline
One of the toughest aspects of any investigation can be quite simple: Which one came first?
The alert might highlight suspicious behavior occurring at 2:00 a.m., but that doesn't mean that the compromise happened at that time.
The initial compromise might have occurred days or weeks ago. The credentials could have been gathered before any lateral movement. The persistence might have been achieved before any ransomware or data exfiltration became evident.
That's where full visibility becomes especially crucial to the IR team. Incident responders need to have enough data from network, endpoints, identity, cloud, and other environments to connect those dots and put together the timeline.
Tools like NetWitness can enable the security team to investigate network behavior along with the other security data, thus providing incident responders with additional information during the attack reconstruction process. Without this information, security teams might find themselves investigating the effects rather than the intrusion itself.
4. Your Existing Security Tools are Not Answering the Important Questions
Security tools generate valuable evidence, but no single alert automatically explains an incident. Your SOC may have SIEM logs, EDR alerts, firewall records, identity data, and threat intelligence. The challenge is connecting those sources.
For example, an unusual login may look harmless on its own. Combine it with unexpected administrative action, a new connection to an unfamiliar system, and suspicious outbound traffic, and the story may look very different.
The NIST recommendations for handling an incident are focused on gathering and analysis of data, taking necessary actions, minimizing damages, identifying the cause of the problem, and returning to normal operations. In case you do not have enough time, tools, and skills in your team for correlating all this information, hiring an incident response team may be helpful.
5. The Incident May Involve Advanced Attack Techniques
Not all cybersecurity incidents require outside experts. However, sophisticated cyberattacks may include use of methods such as living off the land tactics, credential abuse, persistence methods, sophisticated lateral movement, or malware that has never been present in the system before.
Forensics, malware analysis, threat hunting, and network analysis can be required in such cases.
The main issue is not how sophisticated the attack seems to be. The real problem is whether you have enough knowledge and resources on your side to handle the attack without risking anything else.
6. Your Internal Team is Already Overloaded
Other times, the problem is not the absence of data but its capacity to handle it.
In a situation, one would have to work with new alarms, evaluate any systems affected, communicate with management, gather evidence for forensic purposes, collaborate with IT, and assist with recovery all at once. It can become difficult to manage all of these tasks without hampering regular SOC functions even for seasoned professionals.
Having a pre-existing arrangement with an external response company allows the company access to more expertise while its own resources are stretched thin. Retainer programs may also allow processes and contacts to be put in place before the actual incident strikes.
7. You Need an Independent Investigation
There are scenarios in which an outsider’s opinion is beneficial despite the internal team having the technical expertise to deal with the situation.
In cases where there might be a violation of laws, regulations, or the need for insurance and customers' involvement, the company needs an independent incident response team that will be able to investigate the situation and gather evidence and record the findings. It does not mean that the incident will be completely handed over to an outside service provider because in most cases, the internal team is best placed to understand their systems and the organization’s needs.
The best approach is the cooperation between the internal and the outside team.
When Should You Engage Incident Response Experts?
It is impossible to define a universal threshold.
However, there is an effective principle to seek help from experts if the complexity, importance, or uncertain nature of the incident cannot be handled by your response capability comfortably.
This might include incidents of suspected ransomware attacks, compromised privileged credentials, mysterious lateral movement, data theft, persistent attacker behavior, or even just incidents where it is difficult for your team to understand what happened. The sooner you decide this, the more helpful expert knowledge may become. Procrastination on making this decision until the encryption occurs or the evidence is lost makes the reconstruction much more difficult.
Incident response means much more than merely containing the attack. It includes investigation of the event and understanding of its nature and extent, preservation of evidence, reduction of risks, and recovery. When developing your incident response capability, the main question to ask is not whether you have an incident response plan, but whether you have people, expertise, evidence, and visibility required to implement this plan in complicated cases.