What is Incident Response?

No security system is 100 percent effective, and some attacks may get through. When malicious email is delivered to a user’s inbox, the recipient may click on links or forward it within their organization. Any incident that is not properly handled is likely to escalate and spread, causing a more widespread data breach and further damage to internal systems.

Incident response to malicious emails can be a very time-consuming manual process. Users don’t always report suspicious emails they receive, either due to lack of training or negligence. And any independent investigation that is carried out by an IT organization takes a long time and diverts resources away from normal tasks.

When suspicious email is identified or reported to IT, admins need to search through the mail server to identify anyone else within the organization who received the same message. Reviewing and searching through thousands of messages is a long and tedious process. Once affected users are identified, admins then need to contact them to ensure that they remove and do not interact with malicious emails.

Lack of information and tools results in an inefficient manual process that can allow attacks to spread further and cause more damage.

Automated incident response solutions can be very effective at making the process far more efficient, fast, and precise, reducing damage, costs, and downtime related to email-borne attacks.

There are three main parts to an effective automated incident response to malicious emails:

1. Forensics and insights: While your users will continue to report incidents as they arise, your IT organization will benefit from tools that provide insight into delivered mail, helping them identify anomalies and speed up their own investigations.
2. Investigative tools: Once malicious email is identified, your IT teams needs tools to quickly identify all affected users. Automated investigation and search tools help to quickly identify the scale and severity of the attack and immediately prepare for remediation.
3. Remediation: The faster malicious email messages are removed from users’ inboxes, the less likely they are to cause any further damage to an organization. Automated remediation allows admins to remove such messages with single click and send notification to all effected users with instructions to change their passwords.