Organizations implement a comprehensive set of security controls to minimize their risks. For security professionals, it is necessary to understand various types of security controls, their goals, and how their organization can implement them. At times, you would come across terms such as safeguards and countermeasures that are often used interchangeably with controls. The idea behind implementing security controls is to prevent the impact of security incidents or minimize their impact. With the help of such controls, an organization seeks to avoid adverse impact on the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of their systems and data.
Security controls can be classified into various categories, such as preventive, detective, corrective, deterrent, and compensating. This is one of the most widely preferred classifications, and if you have taken up a CISSP course previously, you would be already familiar with these terminologies.
- Preventive controls seek to prevent an incident from happening altogether.
- Detective controls aim to detect a security incident as soon as it has occurred.
- Corrective controls focus on reversing the impact of a security incident.
- Deterrent controls help organizations in discouraging their employees from deliberately causing a security incident.
- Compensatory controls come into picture when the primary controls are not feasible.
Detective, corrective, deterrent, and compensatory controls work in harmony to complement the preventive controls to maintain an adequate level of the security posture of organizations.
What Are Corrective Security Controls?
Corrective security controls include technical, physical, and administrative measures that are implemented to restore the systems or resources to their previous state after a security incident or an unauthorized activity. Corrective controls also cover repairing the damage caused to physical assets such as broken locks and doors, re-issuing new access cards, etc.
Technical corrective controls will involve activities such as implementing a patch for a specific vulnerability, disconnecting an infected system and quarantining malicious files, or terminate a process. Administrative controls requirements organizations to prepare, implement and practice an incident response plan along with investing in necessary resources for their business continuity.
Corrective controls work in sync with detective controls. Detective controls come into action when preventive controls fail. For example, your email service provider fails to prevent delivery of a malicious attachment, and one of your employees downloads it. If there is a control in place that performs live scans on your computer systems for 24×7, the anti-virus solution would immediately detect that the file is malicious in nature. After this detection, corrective actions take over by quarantining the malicious file and deleting it, along with sending a report to the concerned team in your organization.
Importance of CSIRT in Corrective Security Controls
Incident response teams, whether you call them CSIRT or CIRT or CERT, are primarily responsible for an organization’s response to a security event/incident. If you have a dedicated incident response team within your organization, it means that you have an incident response plan in place. A CSIRT team helps your organization in swiftly determining the impact of a security incident and implement corrective controls to ensure that the same incident does not occur in future. During the mitigation of an ongoing incident, a CSIRT documents their activities and collects digital evidence that may be useful for your organization if it faces regulatory or legal proceedings. Based on their learnings and insights, CSIRTs can further share their insights to improve preventive and detective security controls.
So often, organizations prefer outsourcing their incident response function to a trusted service provider like LIFARS. Behind this decision, there can be many constraints. For example, many organizations lack the required technical, human, and financial resources to set up and maintain an incident response team. So, they choose to outsource this function to a trusted vendor to avail on-demand services of highly experienced and skilled security professionals.
Ending Notes: How Does LIFARS Help?
LIFARS provides organization-specific security services to fulfill your business requirements. Instead of generic incident response plans, our security experts help you in preparing an incident response plan with tried-and-tested strategies. With our experience in investigation and remediation of security incidents, we help our clients in having the upper hand while defending against threats and mitigating security incidents. Do you know that LIFARS has a dedicated Computer Security Incident Response Team (LISIRT) to help our clients with incident response? Check more information about LISIRT here.
