How Redjack Helps Enable Compliance With FFIEC Incident Management and Cyber Resilience Guidelines
This is the third blog in a series on FFIEC compliance.
Maintaining compliance with FFIEC guidelines is crucial for safeguarding financial institutions against cybersecurity threats and ensuring regulatory adherence. However, the complexity of these guidelines poses significant challenges for organizations striving to meet stringent standards. Effective compliance demands continuous monitoring, accurate asset management, and a proactive approach to risk mitigation.
The Redjack cyber resilience platform helps you address several key requirements found in the FFIEC Cybersecurity Assessment Tool, playing a crucial role in your compliance efforts.
This is not a complete record of all of the guidelines and standards outlined by the FFIEC. You can find the FFIEC Cybersecurity Assessment Tool, as well as supporting documentation, on the FFIEC’s website.
The FFIEC Cybersecurity Assessment Tool consists of two parts: an Inherent Risk Profile Assessment, and a Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment. This blog will focus on guidelines found in the Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment.
Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment
This blog will cover two parts of the Cybersecurity Maturity Assessment. The first is under the Cyber Incident Management and Resilience Domain in the Section on Incident Resilience Planning and Strategy > Planning. The second part will cover the Section on Incident Resilience Planning and Strategy > Response and Mitigation.
Domain: Cyber Incident Management and Resilience
Section: Incident Resilience Planning and Strategy > Planning
Understanding the full scope of your organization's infrastructure is integral to developing robust continuity and recovery strategies, ensuring that essential assets are prioritized, protected, and efficiently restored in the event of a cybersecurity incident or disaster. With the Redjack platform, you have access to evidence-based information about how your environment truly functions. It empowers you to restore critical business functions and continue operations in the face of an incident.
In many disaster scenarios, significant time is spent just identifying the affected systems and determining what steps are required to bring them back online. For example, during a ransomware incident, a lack of clarity into which systems are vital for business functions and the sequence in which assets need to be brought online in order to restore those functions can lead to uncertainty and financial repercussions. Some organizations, lacking the necessary context for resilience, opt to pay ransom demands as a last resort.
The Redjack platform allows you to look back in time and analyze your infrastructure's pre-disaster state, providing the insight needed for effective recovery. By offering comprehensive visibility into supporting business functions, dependencies, and third-party connections, Redjack equips organizations with the necessary knowledge to restore critical business functions efficiently. This level of insight enables successful live disaster recovery tests before incidents occur, making the seamless restoration of critical business functions involving thousands of IT assets not only possible but achievable.
These capabilities can help you meet the requirements in this section, depending on your level of organizational maturity. These capabilities include:
Baseline (level 1): A formal backup and recovery plan exists for all critical business lines
Baseline (level 1): The institution plans to use business continuity, disaster recovery, and data backup programs to recover operations following an incident
Evolving (level 2): The remediation plan and process outlines the mitigating actions, resources, and time parameters
Evolving (level 2): The corporate disaster recovery, business continuity, and crisis management plans have integrated consideration of cyber incidents
Evolving (level 2): Alternative processes have been established to continue critical activity within a reasonable time period
Evolving (level 2): Business impact analyses have been updated to include cybersecurity
Intermediate (level 3): Plans are in place to re-route or substitute critical functions and/or services that may be affected by a successful attack on Internet-facing systems
Advanced (level 4): Methods for responding to and recovering from cyber incidents are tightly woven throughout the business units’ disaster recovery, business continuity, and crisis management plans
Advanced (level 4): Multiple systems, programs, or processes are implemented into a comprehensive cyber resilience program to sustain, minimize, and recover operations from an array of potentially disruptive and destructive cyber incidents
Advanced (level 4): A process is in place to continuously improve the resilience plan
Section: Incident Resilience Planning and Strategy > Response and Mitigation
In the event of an incident, Redjack provides intelligence for incident response teams to quickly identify affected assets and take appropriate action to contain and mitigate the incident. Redjack revolutionizes asset inventory by adopting a business function perspective, excelling at analyzing communication patterns and profiling devices based on their behavior, which is ideal for reverse engineering an organization's operational processes and workflows.
The platform compiles the list of assets identified by sensors and automatically assigns them to critical business functions, which are then validated by your team. It assesses the importance of assets and business functions to understand their potential business impact in case of downtime. By adopting an evidence-based approach, you can analyze risk more comprehensively, moving beyond manual analysis and subjective estimations.
After an incident, cybersecurity professionals conduct forensic analysis to understand how the incident occurred and what data or systems were compromised. The detailed information about assets, their interactions, dependencies, and connections to critical business functions provided by the Redjack platform is crucial for this forensic investigation. In the event of a security incident, this visibility and knowledge enable rapid identification of affected assets and a comprehensive understanding of the incident's scope. Understanding how assets are interconnected and dependent on each other helps identify potential attack paths. Additionally, knowing the criticality of each asset is vital for efficient incident response. The Redjack platform provides updated information on the criticality and resilience of affected assets, facilitating rapid decision-making and targeted response actions to contain and mitigate the incident.
These capabilities can help you meet the requirements in this section, depending on your level of organizational maturity. These capabilities include:
Baseline (level 1): Appropriate steps are taken to contain and control an incident
Evolving (level 2): A process is in place to help contain incidents and restore operations with minimal service disruption
Evolving (level 2): Records are generated to support incident investigation and mitigation
Evolving (level 2): Analysis of events is used to improve the institution's security measures and policies
Intermediate (level 3): Analysis of security incidents is performed in the early stages of an intrusion to minimize the impact of the incident
Intermediate (level 3): Processes are in place to ensure assets affected by a security incident that cannot be returned to operational status are quarantined, removed, disposed of, and/or replaced
Innovative (level 5): The technology infrastructure has been engineered to limit the effects of a cyber attack on the production environment from migrating to the backup environment
Conclusion
Maintaining compliance with FFIEC guidelines is essential for safeguarding financial institutions against cybersecurity threats and ensuring regulatory adherence. However, the complexity of these guidelines poses significant challenges for organizations striving to meet stringent standards.
The Redjack cyber resilience platform addresses several key requirements found in the FFIEC Cybersecurity Assessment Tool, playing a crucial role in compliance efforts. By providing comprehensive visibility into business functions, dependencies, and third-party connections, Redjack equips organizations with the necessary knowledge to effectively restore critical business functions. The platform's capabilities enable successful disaster recovery tests, allowing seamless restoration of operations involving thousands of IT assets. Additionally, Redjack's intelligence supports incident response teams in quickly identifying affected assets, understanding the scope of incidents, and mitigating impacts.
By adopting an evidence-based approach, organizations can more comprehensively analyze risk and ensure robust cyber resilience. For more information on how Redjack can help you achieve compliance and strengthen your cybersecurity posture, download the FFIEC Compliance white paper or read our case study on how a financial services firm improved its BCDR planning and compliance.
