Cybersecurity Framework: A Detailed Respond Section Assessment

This report provides a comprehensive assessment of the 'Respond' function within a cybersecurity framework, emphasizing its critical role in cybersecurity. It details the contents of the Respond function, including response planning, communication, analysis, mitigation, and improvements, highlighting their importance in timely threat detection and damage analysis. The assessment explores how these components contribute to an organization's security posture, enabling effective responses to potential threats. Furthermore, the report outlines essential documentation needed to validate a client's appropriate implementation of the Respond section, ensuring compliance with security standards and legal requirements. This documentation includes system policies, risk assessment methodologies, and detailed information on subsystems and adjacent systems, crucial for effective risk management and cybersecurity.

Running head: CYBERSECURITY FRAMEWORK – RESPOND ASSESSMENT
Cybersecurity Framework – RESPOND Assessment
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1. Contents in the RESPOND section of the Cybersecurity Framework and its
importance in cybersecurity
While applying a Cyber Security Framework or CSF to a business structure, it has to
be kept in mind that CSF is a set of guidelines used for assessing and improving the ability of
an organization to avert, decipher and respond to any attack from the cyberworld. The
application of CSF includes a Framework Core to the function that involves a few sets of
activities, and each of them has specific outcomes (Kohnke, Shoemaker&Sigler, 2016).
Amongst them, Respond is a function that justifies the ability of a detected cybersecurity
threat. The Respond function consists of the following contents:
 Response planning
 Communications
 Analysis
 Mitigation
 Improvements
While every other function of the framework is importance, the Respond function is
even more critically important, as, given the current scenario, immediate and timely detection
of a threat and analysing the damage it is able to cause to the organization is primarily
essential. The Respond function would help to prevent major data breaches or even a minor
intrusion by hackers.
2. Assessing the content in the RESPOND section
The contents of a Respond section set the purpose for the analysis of the security
levels in the organization (Stouffer et al., 2017). These contents help in the implementation of

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the Detection Function to make responding to the potential threats more effectively. The
detailed assessment of the Respond Function is as described as below:
 Response Planning: The Respond function commences on the idea of the
accomplishments of the previous responses. These responses are executed
appropriately by time. This can occur during the cyber threat in action or the
agility of the detection.
 Communication: The stakeholders of the organizations would communicate
with each other in this content to mark the fate of a detected threat. It is the
organization's call to go further with legal actions taken over the cyber
interventions hampering the business, and this is only effective with proper
communication between the stakeholders at all levels (Scofield, 2016). The
response to the detected threat still goes on by the individual responsible
stakeholder when the conversation is even taking place.
 Analysis: This content would help in analysing the impact of a cybersecurity
threat by investigating on it. This content also confirms the involvement of the
organization in the danger and forensics are performed in this content when
needed.
 Mitigation: The mitigation content is a process that contains and quarantines
a cybersecurity threat so that it loses the impact to spread further to cause
havoc. In addition, this process also realises further threats or pending
vulnerabilities from the detected threats.
 Improvements: The content specifies that after responding to the detected
potential threat, this process utilizes the learnings from the existing scenario to
implement it further in situations like this.

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3. Essential documentation needed to validate that the clients are performing the section
appropriately.
According to the security standards, documentations are essential to understanding
that the client-side is steer clear of any legalities (Drias, Serhrouchni& Vogel, 2015). The
documentation needed from the client side to validate their fair share of appropriateness are
as below:
 Documentation of the system policies and procedures with the detailed
operation procedure
 Documentation of the Risk Assessment methodologies of the organization
 Complete documentation of the sub-systems and adjacent systems with the
cut-off for the scopes of risk management

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Reference
Drias, Z., Serhrouchni, A., & Vogel, O. (2015, August). Analysis of cyber security for
industrial control systems. In Cyber Security of Smart Cities, Industrial Control
System and Communications (SSIC), 2015 International Conference on(pp. 1-8).
IEEE.
Kohnke, A., Shoemaker, D., & Sigler, K. (2016). A Guide to the National Initiative for
Cybersecurity Education (NICE) Cybersecurity Workforce Framework (2.0).
Auerbach Publications.
Scofield, M. (2016). Benefiting from the NIST cybersecurity framework. Information
Management, 50(2), 25.
Stouffer, K., Stouffer, K., Zimmerman, T., Tang, C., Lubell, J., Cichonski, J., & McCarthy, J.
(2017). Cybersecurity framework manufacturing profile. US Department of
Commerce, National Institute of Standards and Technology.