When Minutes Matter: Why First Responder Training is Essential for Minimizing Cyber Incident Impact

To bridge that gap between planning and execution, cyber incident first responders play a crucial role in mitigating the early stages of a cyber incident. Like emergency medical responders, their performance could mean the difference between your company's life and death. 

First responder training is essential for helping your team know what to do and how to do it, even when things don't go according to plan (which they rarely do). 

In honor of Cyber Awareness Month, here are eight reasons to prioritize cyber incident first responder training for your organization:

1. Train together, succeed together. 

We talk a lot about the need to bring a cross-functional team to the table when mounting a robust cyber defense. The same is true in a response scenario. If the first time your network engineers, IT support staff, and security team are ever in a room together is during a breach, you're already starting on the wrong foot. Training a cross-functional team of first responders is vital to understanding each team and each person's role during the triage process and can help minimize confusion and communication breakdown when panic hits.

2. Reduce downtime and financial impact.

It's well-known that shortening the detection and response time can lower the cost of a breach by roughly $1 million, which doesn't even include the risk of regulatory penalties. Training your first responders allows them to jump into action quickly with confidence and avoid wasting time and resources on uncertainty and poor communication.

3. Learn the tools of the trade.

Incident response requires a much different set of tools than most IT teams interact with on a day-to-day basis. Digital forensics, disc imaging, and other processes require purpose-built tooling that isn't part of the usual operations tech stack. First responder training provides an introduction to IR tooling and how it works, along with use cases, expectations, and limitations.

4. Shift to triage thinking.

While your IT team might be outstanding problem solvers, they likely don't default to malware as the potential root cause behind network and endpoint anomalies. Instead, they think first about how to solve them—usually beginning with a reboot. First responder training helps your team shift their mindset from problem-solving to triage, which can help avoid enabling propagation or bringing compromised systems back online too soon.

5. Prioritize evidence preservation.

A downstream effect of failing to triage is evidence destruction or compromise. First responders must consider both the business continuity and legal implications of a breach, including properly preserving evidence. Litigation is a very real risk in breach scenarios, and your team must consider the possibility that the case could end up in legal proceedings from the outset. First responder training can teach your team how to gather and preserve evidence vital for subsequent investigation and defending your organization in court.

6. Establish reporting protocols.

Aside from the immediate security response to lock down systems and mitigate damage, first responders must also be mindful of mandated disclosure requirements when a breach involves personally identifiable information (PII), such as GDPR in the EU and SEC in the US. First responder training can help your team learn to quickly identify whether PII is involved and how and when to promptly notify the Data Protection Officer or Director of Risk to prepare those disclosures.

7. Practice to build confidence.

Best practices only work as far as they fit your network. There's a big difference between learning what you should do and actually applying those tactics within your own environment. First responder training should include tabletop exercises to implement your plan in a practice scenario so you can identify roadblocks and contingency actions before they happen in the middle of an incident.

8. Build your survival kit.

Feeling prepared includes having the necessary supplies on hand so that when an attacker strikes, you're armed and ready to do battle. Assembling a go bag or survival kit with essential supplies can be incredibly valuable at crunch time. In addition to a sequestered workstation, you'll want to have a collection of cables, adapters, write blockers, evidence bags, and more at the ready.

We would also recommend fast hard drives, preferably SSD and USB 3.0 (you don't want that to be a bottleneck in any large transfers during an incident), and appropriate charging cables (most data centers might not have standard power ports, so pack something with an IEC C-14 plug. And since you'll likely be stuck in a data center for hours on end, don't forget to take care of yourself as well by including some deodorant spray, energy drinks, nonperishable snacks, anti-bacterial wipes, and hand sanitizers to prevent the spread of human malware as well as digital.