Cyber incident response

In today's rapidly evolving and highly connected digital landscape, preventing or mitigating cyberattacks can seem almost insurmountable, particularly given the apparent ease with which threat actors can breach systems and data. As technology becomes increasingly essential for meeting the needs of customers, employees, suppliers and other stakeholders, organizations must prioritize resilience and trust.

It is important for organizations to be proactive in minimizing the possibility of cyberattacks. This includes having mature and efficient cyber defense and incident response capabilities to safeguard their data and systems and ensure business continuity in case of unforeseen cyber breaches.

Although there is no universal cyber security plan applicable for all organization, effective protection strategies must be integrated into their governance models, operational processes and culture. When cyber security is woven into the fabric of business, it allows organizations to safeguard critical assets and build overall trust. This means they can capitalize on opportunities, remain resilient, adapt to rapidly evolving risks and regulations and innovate at a faster pace.

KPMG Lower Gulf provides a range of services combining business insight and technical expertise to help organizations tackle cyber threats. As part of our technical services, we offer contextual visibility into managing and minimizing potential vulnerabilities, risks and weaknesses associated with defending our clients’ critical systems and information. Whether an organization requires visibility and confidence in its defense or support in assessing critical systems, our experienced team can help navigate complex issues in simple business terms.

In the event of a cyber incident, our experts combine deep business, technical and regulatory expertise to help organizations return to normal operations as quickly as possible. Our services include identifying root causes, determining what may have been compromised, and advising on how to recover systems and services swiftly and securely. We can also conduct forensic investigations to enable follow-up actions with organizations and help them respond to and recover from attacks.

KPMG Lower Gulf's cyber security approach takes a broad view of business operations and provides visibility and understanding of changing risks as your business and technology programs evolve. We help organizations maintain their information protection agenda to safeguard their data and assets.

We assist organizations in carrying out short-term compromise assessments or long-term threat-hunting services. These assessments aim to identify undetected threats in the environment resulting from traditional technologies. They can also recognize threats that may have remained in the environment post a security incident. Our focused approach classifies indicators of compromise and attacks through a detailed network and endpoint profiling-based assessment. This can be done alone or complemented by proactive assessments (VAPT) or reactive assessments (incident response) to provide organizations with an overall cyber posture.

KPMG experts assist organizations in carrying out detailed digital forensics and incident responses in case of cyber breaches. We provide support across all stages of cyber incident response and detailed root cause analysis. Our forensic technology services assist organizations in performing detailed examinations of system data, user activity and other pieces of digital evidence across file systems, memory, network forensics, and log analysis. These examinations can also determine if an attack is in progress, its root cause and the actions of the threat actors. For incident response, we follow the overarching process to help organizations prepare for, detect, contain and recover from a data breach.

We assist organizations in evaluating their current cyber incident response plans, SOC maturity assessments, response capabilities, as well as identifying gaps for improvement. These assessments allow us to identify blind spots and provide tactical and strategic recommendations to help organizations respond to a cyber event with increased confidence and resilience.

We assist organizations and their staff in stress testing their preventive and detective controls to adequately protect, detect, contain and respond to cyber incidents in a simulated environment. This is done on a periodic basis via cyber war gaming drills or cyber incident simulation exercises. The scenario-driven assessments are realistic and aim to assess the organization’s incident response capabilities, team skillsets, strength of management oversight, and visibility to respond to unforeseen cyber incidents.