As the cybersecurity landscape continues to evolve and threat actor sophistication increases, it is ever more important that you not only have incident response processes in place but that you ensure they work consistently. And, of course, you should continuously iterate and improve over time. Visit - https://www.siemplify.co/blog/testing-incident-response-processes/

1. Testing Incident Response
Putting Your Incident Response
Processes to the Test

2. Introduction
Your class being gathered and ushered into the centermost room of your
school.
Schools run tornado and fire drills so everyone knows what to do, when.
Plus, you don’t want to find out your emergency plans don’t work at the
moment disaster actually strikes.
So why aren’t we applying this logic more broadly in cybersecurity?

3. Are You Regularly Testing Your Incident
Response Processes?

4. Incident Response in Kindergarten
Security operations leaders would do well to take a queue from the
emergency drills of their childhood when it comes to their incident
response programs and processes. What makes sense on paper or the
whiteboard often doesn’t work as planned when put into practice.

5. Cybersecurity & Incident Response
As the cybersecurity landscape continues to evolve and threat actor
sophistication increases, it is ever more important that you not only have
incident response processes in place but that you ensure they work
consistently. And, of course, you should continuously iterate and
improve over time.

6. IR Processes and the School of Hard Knocks
While many organizations go a great lengths to set up effective security
operations incident response plans, very few proactively test their
processes to ascertain how they will work when faced with a real threat.
SANS found that only 33% of organizations periodically review and
update their incident response processes, while another 25% only
review and update their processes after a major incident.

7. Assessment of IR Process

8. How to Test Your IR Processes
● Paper tests are mostly theoretical and may be a first step for security operations
teams who don’t have well-documented incident response processes.
● Tabletop exercises are just that - stakeholders around a table running through
a security event scenario. This technique allows teams to review and practice the
various actions detailed in an incident response process.
● Simulated Attacks - A fully simulated attack is the most effective way of
pressure testing your incident response processes as it uses real life, controlled
attacks to see how an organization will respond when hit by an external threat.
For instance, an organization can simulate the deployment of a known threat

9. Simulated Attacks

10. Optimizing Your IR Processes
Testing your incident response processes yield two important results - a clear
understanding of whether your plan is likely to work and a list of gaps that
should be addressed.
Your incident response playbooks should always be updated after they’ve been
put to use, whether in a simulated scenario or as part of real security incident
triage and remediation. And, through testing, you should identify opportunities
to apply automation to your incident response processes to expedite
remediation and keep your analysts focused on the highest value tasks.

11. The Role of Playbooks
Everything we’ve discussed in this article assumes your organization has some
level of documentation for your incident response processes.
Playbooks ensure that everyone in your organization is on the same page, will
execute processes the same way and knows what their role is in the event of an
incident. As with attack simulations, there are a variety of ways to approach
playbook creation, including automated playbooks available within many
security orchestration platforms.

12. Conclusion
Having the best incident response plan is only as good the paper it’s written on
if it fails to provide a suitable response to a threat. Your incident response
processes should be codified, documented and regularly pressure tested for
vulnerabilities. And you must ensure that playbooks exist and are regularly
updated to reflect lessons learned from the tests and actual incidents.