Integrated Security Incident Management -- Concepts and Real-World Experiences

We present a holistic, process-oriented approach to ISO/IEC 27001 compliant security incident management that integrates multiple state-of-the-art security tools and has been applied to a real-world scenario very successfully for one year so far. The computer security incident response team, CSIRT, is enabled to correlate IT security related events across multiple communication channels and thus to classify any incidents consistently. Depending on an incident's classification, manual intervention or even fully automated reaction steps can be triggered, this starts with simple email notifications of system and network administrators, and scales up to quarantining compromised systems and sub networks automatically. A formally specified security incident response (SIR) process serves as the basis that clearly defines responsibilities, workflows, and interfaces. It has been designed to enable quick reactions to IT security events in a very resource-conserving manner.