All news with #incident response tag

Root Cause Analysis Lags, Undermining Incident Resilience

🔍 Post-incident learning often falls behind containment, with Foundry’s Security Priorities study reporting 57% of security leaders struggled to identify root causes last year. Experts warn that prioritizing firefighting over forensic investigation leaves organizations exposed to repeat breaches and that disciplined evidence preservation is essential. Centralized telemetry such as SIEM, and forensic-capable services like MDR and XDR, plus structured postmortems, are key to building long-term resilience.

Cyber Readiness Stagnates Despite Confidence in Response

🔒 The Immersive Cyber Workforce Benchmark Report 2025 warns that cyber readiness is stalling despite increased confidence in incident response: resilience scores have remained flat since 2023 and the median time to complete critical exercises is 17 days. In the Orchid Corp crisis scenario participants averaged 22% decision accuracy and took 29 hours to contain incidents. Immersive highlights that only 41% of organisations include non-technical roles in simulations and that 60% of training focuses on CVEs older than two years, urging regular, completed training, senior leadership involvement and a focus on current threats and the three pillars: prove, improve, report.

Preventing SOC Burnout with Real-Time Analysis and Automation

🛡️ SOC teams can reduce analyst burnout by replacing noisy alerts and manual chores with real-time behavioral context, automation, and integrated threat intelligence. Platforms such as ANY.RUN deliver interactive sandboxing that exposes full attack chains, automates human-like interactions (for example, solving CAPTCHAs and revealing hidden redirects), and pushes verified IOCs directly into SOC workflows. Organizations report up to 3× faster triage, fewer false positives, and a calmer, more resilient security operations center.

Ground Zero: Five Critical Steps After a Cyberattack

🛡️ Rapid, methodical incident response is essential when you suspect unauthorized access. Activating a rehearsed IR plan and notifying a cross-functional incident team (including HR, PR, legal and executives) helps you quickly establish scope, preserve evidence and maintain chain of custody. Contain affected systems without destroying forensic data, protect offline backups, notify regulators, insurers and law enforcement, then proceed to eradication, recovery and hardening.

Volvo Third-Party Breach Highlights Forensic Readiness Gaps

🔒 In August 2025 Volvo Group North America disclosed a breach that originated in its third‑party HR provider, Miljödata, and a slow timeline of detection and notification has raised questions about forensic readiness. Reported exposed records included Social Security numbers and sensitive employee identifiers, and Volvo offered 18 months of identity‑protection services. The author provides five practical recommendations to preserve evidentiary integrity: embed forensics from day zero, align IR and forensic priorities, automate collection and triage, contractually manage vendor response, and coordinate legal messaging to reduce litigation and regulatory risk.

Internal Conflicts Often Worse Than Cyberattacks for CISOs

🛡️ Roughly 70% of senior security leaders say internal conflicts during a cyber crisis cause more disruption than the attack itself, according to the Cytactic 2025 State of Cyber Incident Response Management (CIRM) Report. The survey of 480 US cybersecurity executives highlights blurred authority, poor communication, and unrehearsed roles that delay response. Experts recommend demonstrating security's business value, reducing operational friction with passwordless controls, and aligning incentives with lines of business.

Ransomware Recovery Failures: Paying Often Doesn't Work

🔐 A Hiscox survey of 1,000 mid-sized firms finds ransomware remains a major risk: 27% of organizations reported attacks in the past year and 80% of victims paid ransom. Yet only 60% of those who paid recovered data fully or partially. Experts cite faulty encryptors, unreliable decryptors, corrupted backups and double/triple extortion as common causes. Industry specialists recommend tested recovery plans, retainers with incident response teams, and robust cyber insurance rather than relying on ransom payments.

Path to CPS Resilience: Securing Critical Infrastructure

🔒 Cyber-physical systems (CPS) underpin critical infrastructure across industry, healthcare and buildings, and their continuous availability is essential to public safety and business continuity. The article urges CISOs to prioritize CPS security, invest in OT protection, close long-standing IT–OT silos and maintain accurate asset inventories. It highlights that many organizations lack OT incident response or business continuity plans and emphasizes that rapid recovery, segmentation and tested emergency procedures are key to minimizing downtime and harm. Analysts warn of steep recovery times and severe financial and human impacts if CPS resilience is not improved.

Ransomware recovery falters: 40% of paying victims lose data

🔒 Two in five companies that pay ransomware attackers still fail to recover their data, according to a Hiscox survey of thousands of SMEs. The study found 27% of businesses were hit in the past year and 80% of affected firms paid a ransom, yet only 60% recovered all or part of their data. Experts blame flawed encryptors, corrupted or compromised backups, and complex double- or triple-extortion tactics. Organisations are urged to maintain tested recovery plans, forensic validation, and incident response retainers rather than rely on payment.

Leading Incident Response Through Empathy and Care

🛡️ Laura Faria, an incident commander with Cisco Talos Incident Response, discusses leading through chaos, empathy, and teamwork during high-pressure security incidents. She traces a career across multiple cybersecurity vendors and sales roles before joining Talos and stepping into incident command. Laura emphasizes purpose-driven response work, particularly when outages affect critical infrastructure and patient safety. The interview highlights resilience, collaboration, and practical leadership lessons.

CISOs Must Rethink Tabletop Exercises and Readiness

⚠️ The Cytactic 2025 State of Cyber Incident Response Management report found that 57% of significant incidents involved attack types the security team had not rehearsed. The finding suggests many tabletop exercises focus on dramatic, familiar scenarios like ransomware rather than the subtle, realistic tactics adversaries commonly use. Reported failures include misplaced burner phones and stale contact lists, illustrating gaps in basic readiness. Experts recommend regularly refreshing tailored simulations, roleplaying smaller breaches, and practicing communications and logistics to build practical muscle memory.

From Ransom to Revenue Loss and Recovery Costs for Business

🔒 Ransomware now inflicts costs far beyond ransom payments, driving operational downtime, reputational damage, and regulatory exposure that directly erode the bottom line. The 2025 Unit 42 report shows median initial extortion demands rose to $1.25M and commonly equate to about 2% of perceived annual revenue. While roughly 48% of victims paid in 2024, Unit 42 negotiation reduced median paid demands to about 0.6% of PAR, yet attackers’ disruptive tactics increasingly amplify recovery costs. Strengthening backups, segmentation, and an incremental zero trust posture are key to limiting impact and shortening recovery timelines.

Inside Microsoft Threat Intelligence: Calm in Chaos

🔎 Microsoft’s Incident Response (IR) team emphasizes calm, clarity, and rapid action when customers encounter major breaches. Adrian Hill explains how IR establishes trust within the first 30 seconds and coordinates with other vendors and stakeholders to stabilize compromised environments. Field discoveries are fed back into Microsoft Threat Intelligence, enabling new detections and product protections. Follow-up recovery, containment, and strategic guidance turn response into lasting partnership.

Six Ways to Curb Security Tool Proliferation in Organizations

🛡️ Organizations facing security-tool sprawl should begin by inventorying controls and eliminating those that no longer map to business risk. Use automated analytics and dashboards to surface ineffective or redundant products, and prioritize tools that enable automation to consolidate alerts and workflows. Remove duplicate solutions—often introduced through acquisitions or silos—and move toward unified platforms while fostering continuous training so teams actually use and benefit from deployed tools.

What Happens When You Engage Talos Incident Response

🔐 Cisco Talos Incident Response (Talos IR) provides rapid, 24/7 crisis support and proactive services to contain, investigate, and remediate cybersecurity incidents. Talos combines deep threat intelligence, digital forensics, and a vendor-agnostic approach to work with existing tools and environments. Engagements follow a structured IR lifecycle—Preparation, Identification, Containment, Eradication, Recovery, and Lessons learned—to minimize disruption and build long-term resilience.

CISA Advisory: Lessons from Recent Incident Response

🔒 CISA published an advisory summarizing lessons learned from an incident response engagement after its endpoint detection and response tool detected potential malicious activity. The guidance emphasizes expedited patching—highlighting exploitation of GeoServer CVE-2024-36401—alongside strengthened incident response planning and enhanced threat monitoring. Organizations are urged to prioritize fixes for public-facing systems, test response playbooks, and implement centralized logging to improve detection and reduce exposure.

Essential Security Tools Every Organization Should Deploy

🔐 Security leaders face a shifting threat landscape, tighter regulation, and increasing IT complexity, so a well-integrated toolset is essential. The article outlines 13 core solution categories — from XDR, MFA and IAM to DLP, CASB, backup/DR and AI‑SPM — and explains how each strengthens detection, access control, data protection and recovery. Emphasis is placed on integration, automation and real-time response to reduce manual verification and satisfy compliance and cyberinsurance requirements.

IR Playbooks and Mental Health After Major Incidents

🛡️ Joe Marshall uses the VPN Filter investigation to illuminate the often-hidden personal cost of incident response. He recounts months of high-pressure analysis into a modular SOHO botnet attributed to APT28 that featured persistence and a potentially destructive kill switch, and describes how prolonged stress produced burnout, fractured relationships, and career impact. Marshall offers four practical mitigations — boundaries, peer support, unplugged self-care, and mandatory decompression — and underscores how a Cisco Talos Incident Response (IR) Retainer can ensure organizations respond decisively while protecting staff wellbeing.

Unit 42 Earns NCSC Enhanced Level Incident Response

🔒 Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 has been added to the UK's NCSC Cyber Incident Response scheme at the Enhanced Level, demonstrating certified capability to manage the most complex and impactful cyber incidents. The assurance verifies structured, government-benchmarked processes, strong investigative expertise, and a customer-focused retainer model tailored to regulatory and operational needs. This recognition underscores Unit 42's role in helping organisations reduce dwell time, contain threats faster, and strengthen long-term resilience.

Alex Ryan: From Zero Chill to Quiet Confidence at Talos

🔒 In this Humans of Talos interview, Alex Ryan, an Incident Commander with Cisco Talos Incident Response, reflects on her unconventional path from liberal arts degrees to a career in cybersecurity and threat intelligence. She describes the technical and emotional realities of incident response—triaging IOCs, conducting forensic analysis, and quickly building customer trust—while managing high stress and business risk. Ryan also discusses recovering from burnout after parenthood, learning to set boundaries, and how a supportive team helps sustain long-term performance.