Prioritization is key in various areas of life. For instance, you want to go shopping, so you create a list of items you would love to buy. But your budget can't afford every item on your list. You decide to forgo the least important things and buy the most important ones.

The above scenario is what happens with triage. But instead of shopping for items, you are dealing with cyber incidents. What exactly is triage, how does it work, and what are its benefits?

What Is Triage in Cybersecurity?

Triage is an incident response technique for identifying and prioritizing your response to cyber threats. It helps you analyze threat alerts to determine the most harmful or impactful ones and prioritize them over others to prevent damage to your system.

How Does Triage Work?

Triage doesn’t undermine cyberattacks. It helps you manage your resources, so you can resolve pressing threats effectively. To do that, you have to classify the alerts you receive into three major categories: low priority, medium priority, and high priority.

1. Low Priority

Low-priority alerts aren’t completely harmless, but they don’t have any significant impact on your network operations and user experience. These threats aren’t visible on the surface. You can only notice them when you take a closer look at your system.

In most cases, you are the only one who notices low-priority incidents since you are the network owner or administrator. An example of a low-priority alert is a sudden spike in traffic.

2. Medium Priority

Medium-priority alerts have some level of impact on your network. You can tell that the user experience isn’t as seamless as it used to be, but there's no obstruction.

You may choose to delay responding to medium-priority threats, especially when you are preoccupied with important tasks or activities. An example of this is phishing attack content delivered to you.

3. High Priority

High-priority alerts can halt your operations if the threats linger. You either resolve them immediately or risk suffering downtime. These incidents have the potential to damage your system. An example of a high-priority alert is a malware attack.

Classifying threats can be tricky. There are two factors you must consider to get it right—impact and urgency.

Impact

Identifying the impact of an incident alert requires prior measurement. You must outline possible threats and measure how they’ll impact your system. Threats with lower impact give you fewer reasons to worry while threats with higher impact give your more reasons to worry.

Urgency

Urgency, in this context, refers to how long it takes an incident to harm your network. If it doesn't have any significant impact on your system even when it lingers, it’s not so urgent.

Managing Cyber Incidents With Triage

Once you successfully categorize incident alerts, you can then proceed to manage them accordingly when they occur. Here's how to manage incidents with triage.

Determine Incident Technique

There are various attack techniques threat actors deploy for different situations. The first step to resolving an incident with triage is to identify the attack method in question. This will guide you in mapping the right strategies to counter it.

Identify Affected Areas

Cyberattacks are coordinated, not random. To have a high success rate, the intruder focuses on their targets. Examine the incident thoroughly to find out the specific areas it impacted. Most times, threat actors steal or compromise data in an attack, so confirm that your data is in good condition.

Measure Attack Density

Cyber incidents aren’t always what they seem on the surface. Data theft or exposure might be the focal point of an incident, but it could be more concentrated beyond that. There could be underlying impacts you aren’t aware of. Measuring the attack density helps you address all possible issues.

Check Attack History

There’s a chance that your system has encountered such an incident previously. An effective way to know this is to look at your attack history. Identifying any correlation between previous attacks and the current ones could help in finding missing puzzles.

Respond With a Plan

Triage is part of the incident response process. Enter all the information you have gathered into your incident response plan, and respond with a combination of policies, procedures, and processes to achieve desired results.

What Are the Benefits of Triage in Cybersecurity?

Triage originated from medical practice. Care providers manage limited resources to administer care to patients in critical conditions. Applying this technique to your cybersecurity offers several benefits including the following:

1. Efficient Use of Resources

Implementing cybersecurity requires the right manpower, tools, and applications. Even the biggest platforms with high-security budgets still try to manage their resources to avoid waste as it could impact their operations in the long run. As an individual with limited means, you can’t afford to invest in every threat alert the minute they arise.

Triage allows you to manage your resources and channel them to areas that need them the most. There’s no room for waste as you can account for every dime or resource you use and see its results.

2. Prioritize Critical Data

Critical data is at the center stage of your operations. While losing any data can be an inconvenience, it gets even more serious when you lose critical data. Not only it is very sensitive, but it also has a high value.

Triage ensures that you give your critical data the utmost attention it deserves by prompting you to act if it’s exposed to threats. Without triage, you might be attending to insignificant incidents just because they occurred first while your most priced data is under attack.

3. Resolve Threats Speedily

Delaying in responding to threats that have a significant impact on your system worsens the situation. The triage threat classification enables you to determine high-priority alerts ahead of time. Once you get a notification of such threats, you can act immediately.

Focusing on key metrics of the incident from your triage analysis also prevents you from wasting time on irrelevant and redundant procedures. This makes your response timely and effective.

Secure Your Most Critical Data With Triage

If you have an active network, you’ll encounter numerous threats regularly. While resolving each threat rapidly seems like a good idea, you may end up missing or neglecting the most urgent threats just because you are addressing the ones that have little or no impact on your network. Triage helps you focus on what's most important to you at any given time.