What are the biggest incident response challenges for small and medium-sized businesses?

In the heartbeat of our digital systems, delays in detection can feel like a missed note. Despite limited monitoring capabilities, our vigilance forms a symphony, ensuring that every anomaly is heard and responded to in harmony.

The foremost challenge for small and medium-sized businesses in incident response is the absence of a well-defined and practiced plan. Without a structured approach, they may struggle to coordinate actions, leading to delays and increased vulnerabilities during security incidents.

At minimum, administrative controls should be implemented and enforced. These controls may then be used as guidance to implement additional controls or solutions. RACI matrix is another useful tool defining the roles and expectations of a team. It clearly defines who is responsible, who is accountable, who should be consulted and who should be informed throughout the incident life cycle. The IRP, incident response plan, should be a living document that captures elements as part of lesson learned from previous incidents.

Due to this lack of planning,many small scale enterprise suffer from lack of preparedness for security incident making it hard to contain and manage this risk when they occur.

In the SMB world, tackling cybersecurity incidents is a complex & challenging yet crucial task due to: Lack of Resources: SMBs often face limitations in their IT infrastructure, lacking the hardware and software needed for robust cybersecurity. This makes them more susceptible to advanced cyber attacks. Expertise Deficit: Attracting cybersecurity talent is tough for SMBs, often losing out to larger firms. This leads to a gap in effectively identifying risks and implementing security tools. Budget Constraints: Cybersecurity isn't cheap, and for budget-tight SMBs, it's often not prioritized, leaving them exposed & unprepared for incidents. 🔑 Solution? Embrace cloud based security services & partnering with security providers like Armoryze.

With the cybersecurity market booming, it is increasingly difficult for smaller companies to hire good resources in the market. In this way, many companies end up using non-specialized resources and even shared resources from other functions. The result is a delivery below expectations and good market practices, causing these companies to suffer even more from the impacts of cyber incidents.

Small and medium-sized companies should have a minimum necessary contingent and outsource other functions, especially forensic analysis and level 3 incident response activities, given the high cost of maintaining specialized and dedicated teams for these activities.

Typically, the lack of awareness is paired with a misbelief that cyber threats do not pertain to them, with a misunderstanding of what cybersecurity actually is. It boils down to grassroot education efforts. As security professionals we need to provide industry specific awareness campaigns with a focus on the impacts that matter to those specific organizations. These grassroot efforts also must be pushed not just from security professionals, but other institutions important to organizations like investors. Venture Capital firms for example also need cyber awareness campaigns so they in turn can then bring that awareness to their portfolio companies. Awareness is a multi-prong effort that can't just come from us.

Awareness campaigns should work better in smaller companies, considering that people generally know each other and it is easier to spread knowledge through email campaigns, lectures or internal events.

Truth is, a lot of small and medium sized enterprises are not aware of cyber risks nor the need for incidence response. Awareness, targeting these small business, should be done to get them up and active in incidence response.

Visibility and actionable intelligence are two of the most crucial aspects of an incident response. Without one or both, threat actors are able to persist, increase their dwell time, and stage escalate. It is imperative to have the right combination of tools, talent and scope to be able to respond effectively while not exacerbating the breach.

These businesses often grapple with insufficient budget allocation for cybersecurity. Another challenge is the tendency of top management to underestimate the risk and potential impact of cyber incidents.