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Responding to Customer's Security Incidents—Part 2: Executing a Policy

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: Executing a Policy

There have been several large-scale worm attacks on the Internet since 1988 and highly visible and coordinated denial-of-service attacks in the last few years causing billions of dollars in damage. These attacks indicate that responding to such incidents is increasingly more complex and requires technical knowledge, communication, and coordination among the staff responding to an incident, along with an adherence to applicable standards and policies.

A security incident response involves several aspects of preventive, detective, and recovery measures. A preventive measure primarily involves risk control that mitigates the effects or deters the occurrence of an undesirable event. Examples of preventive measures are passwords, keycards, badges, contingency plans, policies, firewalls, and encryption. A detective measure identifies the occurrence of an undesirable event. Examples of detective measures are visitor logs, audit trails, motion sensors, closed-circuit TV, and security reviews. Detective measures also provide a means for reporting the occurrence of events. A recovery measure is a risk control that will, in a traditional sense, include control policies, processes, or mechanisms that restore the integrity, availability, and confidentiality of information assets to their expected state. Examples of recovery measures are fault tolerance, backup, and disaster recovery plans.




": Executing a Policy" is the second of a series of articles that discuss a security incident response policy and execution. These articles are not intended to include all of the material from the above efforts. They are intended to capture the salient points of the security incident response process and to present them in the context of a business entity that serves its constituents (that is, its customers).



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