In security, there’s a gap between perception and reality. According to the Cisco 2015 Annual Security Report, 90 percent of companies are confident about their security policies, processes, and procedures – yet 54% have had to manage public scrutiny following a security breach. Not only are there direct costs to a security breach – there are also intangible expenses, including a negative impact to brand reputation, and the erosion of customer trust.

As John Chambers articulated recently at the World Economic Forum in Davos, “There are two types of companies: those who have been hacked, and those who don’t yet know they have been hacked.”  2015 is going to be another year where organizations around the world can expect to be under attack or will discover that they have been infiltrated.

There is a widening gap between resources and needs, as security practitioners lack both funding and manpower to adequately protect assets and infrastructure.  Because of this, CISO’s are increasingly looking to external experts for security guidance.

This is why we are unveiling our Security Incident Response Services.   Our new Incident Response Service is designed to advise organizations on how to reduce time to detection, containment and remediation. Our experts identify the source of infection, where it entered the environment, and what data was compromised. By going to the source – patient zero – and identifying malware movement throughout the environment, organizations can minimize the cost and overall impact of any breach, as well as identify methods to reduce future risk.  The service leverages threat intelligence from the Cisco Talos Security Intelligence and Research Group, Cisco security technologies including AMP Threat Grid and the expertise of the Cisco Security Solutions (CSS) team.  The Incident Response Service supports businesses in two areas:

Cyber Attack Response

Every event is unique and our Security Incident Response methodology provides expedience and allows for flexibility to continuously adjust to the dynamic threat landscape. Whether it’s an insider threat, distributed denial of service, advanced malware at the endpoints or customer data breach, the team guides an organization through identification, isolation and remediation using analysis and data mining, forensic image analysis, infected system dynamic instrumentation, malware reverse engineering and exploit analysis and re‐implementation.

Cyber Security Readiness

As businesses fall victim to increasingly targeted cyber-attacks and data breaches, they need external expertise to assess and promote security best practices as well as to protect corporate data and prepare for the inevitable data breach incident. An important pre-requisite for a successful incident response capability is a strong Incident Response plan, When an incident occurs, everyone knows how to respond, how to escalate, what to do, quickly and effectively. Cisco Incident Response offerings spans infrastructure breach preparedness assessments, security operations readiness assessments, breach communications assessments, and training among other activities.

Our team of experts has been actively working with customers for cyber attack response.  A recent engagement was initiated when a company had identified consumer credit card data exfiltration.  Working hand-in-hand with the customer, federal law enforcement and Cisco Talos, the Incident Response Services team discovered a new malware family targeting point of sale (PoS) systems.  The team identified malware patient zero and its lateral movement mechanism.  This ultimately led to the team’s discovery of a new family of malware, “PoSeidon,” which is detailed in this blog post.  Using best of breed technology, our incident response expertise, and working closely with Talos, the Cisco Incident Response Service team compressed the process of identifying, isolating and remediating for this customer by developing detection and countermeasures.

For more information on Security Incident Response Services team, please see our overview video and our Cisco Security Launch Page.