Prioritization is key in various areas of life.
But your budget can’t afford every item on your list.
You decide to forgo the least important things and buy the most important ones.
The above scenario is what happens with triage.
But instead of shopping for items, you are dealing with cyber incidents.
What exactly is triage, how does it work, and what are its benefits?
What Is Triage in Cybersecurity?
Triage is an incident response technique for identifying and prioritizing your response to cyber threats.
How Does Triage Work?
Triage doesnt undermine cyberattacks.
It helps you manage your resources, so you’re free to resolve pressing threats effectively.
These threats arent visible on the surface.
you might only notice them when you take a closer look at your system.
An example of a low-priority alert is a sudden spike in traffic.
Medium Priority
Medium-priority alerts have some level of impact on your internet.
An example of this is phishing attack content delivered to you.
High Priority
High-priority alerts can halt your operations if the threats linger.
You either resolve them immediately or risk suffering downtime.
These incidents have the potential to damage your system.
An example of a high-priority alert is a malware attack.
Classifying threats can be tricky.
There are two factors you must consider to get it rightimpact and urgency.
Impact
Identifying the impact of an incident alert requires prior measurement.
You must outline possible threats and measure how theyll impact your system.
Here’s how to manage incidents with triage.
Determine Incident Technique
There arevarious attack techniques threat actors deployfor different situations.
The first step to resolving an incident with triage is to identify the attack method in question.
This will guide you in mapping the right strategies to counter it.
Identify Affected Areas
Cyberattacks are coordinated, not random.
To have a high success rate, the intruder focuses on their targets.
Examine the incident thoroughly to find out the specific areas it impacted.
Measure Attack Density
Cyber incidents arent always what they seem on the surface.
There could be underlying impacts you arent aware of.
Measuring the attack density helps you address all possible issues.
Check Attack History
Theres a chance that your system has encountered such an incident previously.
An effective way to know this is to look at your attack history.
Identifying any correlation between previous attacks and the current ones could help in finding missing puzzles.
Respond With a Plan
Triage is part of the incident response process.
What Are the Benefits of Triage in Cybersecurity?
Triage originated from medical practice.
Care providers manage limited resources to administer care to patients in critical conditions.
Applying this technique to your cybersecurity offers several benefits including the following:
1.
Efficient Use of Resources
Implementing cybersecurity requires the right manpower, tools, and applications.
Triage allows you to manage your resources and channel them to areas that need them the most.
Prioritize Critical Data
Critical data is at the center stage of your operations.
While losing any data can be an inconvenience, it gets even more serious when you lose critical data.
Not only it is very sensitive, but it also has a high value.
Resolve Threats Speedily
Delaying in responding to threats that have a significant impact on your system worsens the situation.
The triage threat classification enables you to determine high-priority alerts ahead of time.
Once you get a notification of such threats, you could act immediately.
This makes your response timely and effective.
Triage helps you focus on what’s most important to you at any given time.
