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Empowering Incident Response: How SIRP Integrates CISA's NCISS for Better Cybersecurity

 

Did you know that over 70% of security breaches are attributed to delayed responses and improperly prioritized alerts? With cyber threats escalating daily, missing critical alerts can be devastating. To counter this, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) developed the National Cyber Incident Scoring System (NCISS)—a powerful framework for prioritizing and assessing cyber incidents effectively.

At SIRP, we bring the benefits of NCISS into our SOAR platform, empowering organizations to triage incidents swiftly, make informed response decisions, and ensure that resources are directed to the most critical alerts without delay. Here's how this integration can redefine security operations and boost resilience against evolving threats.

What is NCISS?

The CISA National Cyber Incident Scoring System (NCISS) is a specialized scoring framework designed to measure the severity of cyber incidents, guiding organizations in their response and resource allocation. Originally developed by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), NCISS is increasingly utilized by government agencies, critical infrastructure providers, and cybersecurity-focused enterprises that require rigorous, standardized incident assessment.

How NCISS Calculates Severity

NCISS assigns incident severity based on specific, predefined categories—each reflecting key risk factors in cybersecurity. These categories cover a range of attributes, such as the type of threat, potential impact, and organizational vulnerabilities. By selecting from established options within each category, organizations can calculate a score that reflects the incident’s overall threat level. This score helps security teams prioritize incidents accurately and respond swiftly to the most pressing threats.

 

Predefined Categories and Options

The NCISS framework comes equipped with pre-set categories and options, allowing for a systematic evaluation process. NCISS evaluates incidents across the following categories:

  1. Impact on Public Safety
    Focus: Assesses the potential for harm to the public due to a cyber incident.
    Options: Minor, Moderate, Major, and Severe impact levels.
    Weight: High, as public safety breaches, require immediate attention.

  2. Impact on National Security
    Focus: Evaluate threats to national security interests.
    Options: Low, Moderate, Significant, and Critical.
    Weight: High, especially for incidents involving state actors or high-value targets.

  3. Impact on Economic Security
    Focus: Determines the potential economic repercussions, including financial losses and market disruptions.
    Options: Insignificant, Low, Medium, and High impact.
    Weight: Medium to high, based on the financial assets or sectors involved.

  4. Impact on Public Confidence
    Focus: Assesses how an incident may influence public trust in organizational or governmental functions.
    Options: Minor, Noticeable, Major, and Widespread loss of confidence.
    Weight: Medium, though weight can be increased based on visibility and scope of the breach.

  5. Exploitation of Sensitive Data
    Focus: Evaluate if sensitive data was accessed, modified, or compromised.
    Options: No Exploitation, Suspected Exploitation, Confirmed Exploitation.
    Weight: Medium to high, particularly if the data pertains to critical assets.

  6. Effect on Critical Infrastructure
    Focus: Examines the impact on infrastructure vital to national and economic security.
    Options: Minimal, Moderate, Significant, and Critical disruption.
    Weight: High, as disruption here affects essential services and public operations.

  7. Disruption to Essential Services
    Focus: Measures the degree of disruption to essential public and private sector services.
    Options: Low, Moderate, Severe, and Complete.
    Weight: High due to the potential for cascading effects in essential sectors.

  8. Threat Actor Capability
    Focus: Evaluates the sophistication of the threat actor behind the incident.
    Options: Low (unskilled), Moderate (some skill), High (advanced), and Elite (highly skilled).
    Weight: Variable, depending on the actor's known or suspected affiliations and resources.

  9. Threat Actor Intent
    Focus: Assesses the intent of the threat actor, such as espionage, sabotage, or financial gain.
    Options: Financial gain, Espionage, Sabotage, and Terrorism.
    Weight: Variable, though typically higher for incidents motivated by espionage or terrorism.
  10. Mitigations Available
    Focus: Looks at the immediate response or control measures available to mitigate the impact.
    Options: Strong, Moderate, Minimal, and None available.
    Weight: Moderate, as stronger mitigations reduce incident severity.

Each incident’s score is calculated by selecting the appropriate level from each category, which then feeds into an overall score. This score offers a clear, consistent measure of incident priority, enabling teams to respond more effectively and allocate resources with confidence.

Significance of NCISS in Cybersecurity

The implementation of NCISS within the SIRP platform offers several key benefits:

  1. Prioritization of Alerts
    The NCISS scoring system allows security teams to prioritize alerts based on their potential impact on the organization. By categorizing incidents and assigning scores, teams can focus on the most pressing issues, improving response times and reducing the risk of data breaches.

  2. Enhanced Incident Management: With the possibility of NCISS score calculation in SIRP, users can access a comprehensive view of incidents, complete with scores and breakdowns of category weights. This visibility empowers teams to make informed decisions during the incident response process.

  3. Data-Driven Decision Making
    The NCISS equips security teams with quantitative data on the severity of incidents, allowing for informed decision-making. This data-driven approach enhances the ability to assess risk, plan responses, and improve overall cybersecurity posture.

  4. Regulatory Compliance and Reporting
    Utilizing the NCISS helps organizations align with cybersecurity regulations and best practices. It provides a clear methodology for documenting incident severity, which can be crucial for compliance reporting and audits.

 

Who Can Benefit from NCISS in SIRP?

The NCISS feature within SIRP empowers various cybersecurity and IT teams by providing a structured, data-driven approach to incident prioritization and response. Here’s how different teams can benefit from NCISS:

  1. Security Operations Centers (SOCs)
    For Security Operations Center (SOC) teams, managing an overwhelming volume of alerts is a daily challenge. With NCISS in SIRP, SOC teams can systematically assess and rank incidents, ensuring that critical threats receive immediate attention. By automating prioritization, NCISS reduces alert fatigue and enables SOC analysts to focus on high-severity incidents, improving response times and elevating the overall efficiency of security operations. This capability is invaluable for SOCs aiming to maintain robust, proactive defenses and continuously improve their incident handling.

  2. Incident Response Teams
    Incident Response (IR) teams rely on real-time, actionable data to respond effectively to threats. NCISS provides a consistent scoring mechanism that helps these teams gauge the severity of each incident, making it easier to assign resources where they are needed most. With NCISS, IR teams can adopt a streamlined, consistent approach to assess threats and apply critical mitigations, ensuring that high-impact incidents are managed swiftly. This feature supports faster containment and recovery efforts, significantly reducing the potential damage of cyber incidents.

  3. IT Administrators and Infrastructure Managers
    IT administrators, responsible for maintaining the integrity and availability of an organization’s infrastructure, benefit from NCISS by gaining a clear framework for prioritizing vulnerabilities and threats. This allows them to allocate their resources efficiently based on the calculated severity of incidents. By helping administrators see the bigger picture of incident impact on essential services and infrastructure, NCISS ensures that IT efforts align with organizational security goals, focusing on maintaining operational continuity while addressing high-severity risks.

  4. Compliance and Risk Management Teams
    Compliance officers and risk management teams can use NCISS as a metric to evaluate security posture and adherence to regulatory requirements. NCISS enables these teams to prioritize incidents that pose compliance risks, ensuring a proactive approach to regulatory obligations and risk management. This is especially valuable in sectors that require stringent security standards, as NCISS can guide teams in adhering to regulations and minimizing potential legal or financial consequences of unaddressed threats.

  5. C-Suite and Security Leadership
    NCISS provides a high-level overview of incident severity, which is essential for C-suite executives and security leaders making strategic decisions. With clear, quantifiable insights into the potential impact of incidents, leadership teams can better understand security trends, resource needs, and the ROI of security investments. This enables them to communicate risk and security priorities effectively across the organization and make informed decisions on resource allocation, policy development, and long-term security planning.

Incorporating NCISS into SIRP not only enhances incident prioritization but also enables organizations to respond with precision across various roles, ensuring a cohesive and effective cybersecurity posture.

Conclusion

As cyber threats continue to evolve, organizations must adopt proactive measures to protect their digital assets. SIRP's integration of the CISA National Cyber Incident Scoring System (NCISS) empowers organizations to streamline their incident response processes, prioritize alerts effectively, and enhance collaboration among security teams. Leveraging SOAR capabilities, SIRP ensures that organizations can respond to incidents with confidence, ultimately safeguarding their operations and reputations.

Imagine a security operations center where threats are not just data points on a screen but carefully ranked incidents that guide response efforts. With the NCISS feature, your team can easily prioritize the most critical alerts, ensuring that high-severity incidents are addressed without delay. This structured approach to threat prioritization transforms overwhelming volumes of alerts into clear, actionable insights, allowing your team to focus on what matters most.

Automation plays a pivotal role in this transformation. By automating incident scoring, SIRP helps eliminate the tedious process of manual triaging, empowering your teams to work more efficiently. As a result, your incident response efforts become not just faster but also smarter, freeing up resources that can be directed toward proactive security measures and strategic initiatives.

Moreover, the clear scoring system provided by NCISS facilitates optimal resource allocation. Security teams can ensure that their efforts and assets are concentrated on the threats that pose the greatest risk to their organization.

In a landscape where speed and precision are paramount, implementing SIRP’s NCISS feature is a crucial step toward fortifying your organization's defenses. By embracing this innovative approach to incident management, you not only enhance your ability to respond to today’s complex cyber threats but also build resilience for the challenges of tomorrow. Take control of your incident management process today and experience the transformative benefits of automated, prioritized incident response.