15 February 2024
Data Breach Costs Continue To Rise: Is Your Incident Response Plan Ready?
The IBM Cost of a Data Breach report states, that, when compared to 2020 the average cost of a data breach in 2023 increased by more than 15%. The report also adds that IR planning and testing emerged as a highly effective tactic for containing the cost of a data breach. Is your team set up to respond in the event of an incident?
It is strongly recommended you regularly test your incident response plan, ideally twice a year because –
- It is important to confirm that the defined roles and responsibilities assigned to your response team are appropriate.
- Testing will help team members to understand and remember the actions they need to take.
- Your team will gain better clarity as to how your triage and escalation processes work in the real world.
With practice, staff should build confidence and be in a better position to handle a pressured situation when it arises.
Kaon Security can facilitate a tabletop exercise which will see you gather all your key players together, pose some breach scenarios and have everyone talk through their part of the response, as detailed by your plan. The value derived from this approach is that you will quickly identify gaps in the plan and its execution, raise some questions that need to be addressed and draft an action items list.
You can view the key elements of our Incident Response Optimisation service here.
Flying blind?
In a blackbox penetration test exercise the test team have no prior knowledge of your target systems, as would often be the case for an external attacker. Starting with minimal information they proceed to gather details using a variety of reconnaissance and enumeration techniques. As weaknesses and vulnerabilities are identified, attempts are made to exploit them. Often this can result in a successful outcome for the test team, as they gain access to a customer network and validate it is possible for a would-be attacker to take several actions such as privilege escalation, accessing sensitive information or move laterally.
What are some of the benefits of undertaking a blackbox penetration test?
As this type of testing mimics the approach of a real attacker there is a reasonable chance it will uncover internal and external vulnerabilities that might be missed in other forms of testing. Once vulnerabilities are uncovered you can prioritise the most critical risks, determine what resources are required to address them and execute a plan to do so. Blackbox penetration testing can be used to improve your organisations incident response preparedness. As a test will simulate real-world attack scenarios, you can evaluate the effectiveness of your incident response procedures and improve them accordingly.
Contact us for a discussion on how Kaon Security can assist your organisation to be better prepared to deal with an incident or breach.
New addition to the Kaon Security team
We are pleased to announce that Charles (Charlie) Hunter has rejoined the Kaon Security team and is responsible for managing sales and customer relationships in ANZ for our Policy Management as a Service business. Charlie will be known to several of our current customers, as he was a Business Development Manager for us from 2010 to 2015.