Incident Response Training

Even the best-laid plans can fall apart in unprepared hands. That’s why incident response training is essential—It helps organizations and their employees prepare for a wide range of disruptive events. These may include, but are not limited to:

• An unplanned outage
• Natural disasters
• Network compromise
• A data breach
• Ransomware
• A distributed denial of service attack

Specific to cyberattacks, incident response training teaches employees to recognize, identify, and remediate cybersecurity incidents. It also acclimatizes them to the organization’s incident response plan, ensuring everyone understands their role and responsibilities should a disruptive event occur. An effective cyber incident response training program puts incident response plans to the test, identifying any potential pitfalls and bottlenecks in the process.

Security awareness training and cyber incident response training overlap but should not be treated as interchangeable.

Incident response training ensures an organization is prepared to detect, identify, and contain cyber incidents. Its focus is on active plans and processes.

Security awareness training, on the other hand, is about general education. It helps promote a culture of cybersecurity by teaching people about the risks and threats their organization may face. It also teaches best practices on a wide variety of security-related topics, including:

• Password hygiene
• Avoiding phishing attacks
• Access management
• Device management
• Application management

Security awareness training and cyber incident response training are ultimately two sides of the same coin. The former helps people understand their organization’s cybersecurity landscape, while the latter prepares them to keep their business up and running. Both should be considered necessary components of an organization’s cybersecurity strategy.