Incident Response — Forensics

Here are the typical actions a forensic investigator would take:

Preliminary research: Forensic investigations begin with some research on the company. The PFI needs to “scope” out the merchant’s environment, finding out where critical data resides, the systems that connect to it, and how the data flows in and out of the network.

Onsite data gathering: The forensics team then goes onsite and gathers data from identified devices.

Analysis: The investigation team brings the data back to their headquarters and analyzes it thoroughly to confirm whether a data breach actually occurred, determine what data the attacker was able to steal, and discover which vulnerabilities were exploited in the breach.

Reports: About a week after the initial data acquisition, the investigator will issue a short preliminary report that shows whether or not they’ve discovered any indicators of compromise or other overt evidence of a data compromise. After the forensic data has been fully analyzed, the investigator will submit a complete final report that includes how the attack happened, which vulnerabilities were exploited, and what data was at risk.

Forensic investigations can be costly.  However, remember that the investigation involves one or more PFI’s examining a mountain of data.

The cost will depend on the size of your organization; the larger your organization, the more data you likely have that will need to be examined.

An incident response plan is a documented, written plan with 6 distinct phases that helps IT professionals and staff recognize and deal with a cybersecurity incident like a data breach or cyber attack. Properly creating and managing an incident response plan involves regular updates and training.

A well-executed incident response plan can minimize breach impact, reduce fines, decrease negative press, and help you get back to normal operations more quickly.

Here's a helpful blog that goes over the six phases of incident response.

While every organization needs varying policies, training, and documents, there are a few itemized response lists that most organizations should include in their incident response plan, such as:

• Emergency contact/communications list
• System backup and recovery processes list
• Forensic analysis list
• Jump bag list
• Security policy review list

Check out this helpful handout here that goes into more detail about what should be included in your incident response plan.

The bare minimum of what to do when you get hacked:

1. Change passwords immediately on all systems and routers.
2. Disable remote access.
3. Preserve firewall logs and current settings. Then restrict traffic to business critical servers and ports. Systems that process credit card data for authorization and settlement (either back office server or point of sale systems) should be restricted to only communicate outside with the payment gateway.
4. If an ecommerce site is breached, preserve any altered pages.
5. Update your antivirus tools and run malware scans on all devices in the card data environment. (Quarantine any findings—do not delete)
6. Save log files.
7. Save a copy of malware and malware log files on a quarantined external drive (if discovered).
8. On Linux systems, copy as much of the bash_history files for all accounts as possible.
9. Under the direction of a PFI, and only if you have the IT skill, make a forensic image of the system before wiping and installing a new system.
10. Document all changes with the date and a description of the actions taken.
11. If you re-image your systems or switch to new devices, only install software from known “clean” images.
12. Engage a security consultant (preferably a PFI or QSA) to preserve the compromised environment for future data breach review.

You can also get more information by checking out this blog on the six phases of responding to a breach.