What is Root Cause Analysis (RCA)?

The causes behind many issues in cybersecurity and IT are only sometimes immediately obvious. For example, an application may crash because a computer unexpectedly restarted; however, this restart may have been caused by a brief power outage, which is the incident’s root cause. Root cause analysis (RCA) is a process designed to determine the root or primary cause of an incident.

RCA helps IT and security teams identify these root causes. This enables them to address these issues and prevent future incidents from occurring.

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When is a Root Cause Analysis Needed?

Root cause analysis is useful whenever something goes wrong. From a cybersecurity perspective, this could be a cybersecurity incident or a surge in vulnerabilities in corporate software. From an IT perspective, root cause analysis may be focused on performance issues or inefficiencies in corporate networks and systems.

RCA is useful in these scenarios because it can enable teams to determine the real reason why an issue is occurring. Instead of addressing the symptoms or intermediate causes of issues, RCA enables teams to find the true cause and prevent future incidents.

Goals of RCA

RCA is a process designed to explore the real reasons why an undesirable event is occurring. Some of the key goals include:

  • Identifying Causal Factors and Root Causes: RCA identifies the direct causes of a problem and iterates to work back to the root cause. The end goal is to identify the original issue that sparked one or more other problems.
  • Address Root Causes: Once a root cause has been identified, the team can develop tools, processes, etc. to address it. For example, additional training may be necessary to educate developers about vulnerabilities and prevent these vulnerabilities from cropping up and being exploited in corporate applications.
  • Prevent Future Incidents: By addressing a root cause, an organization reduces the risk of it recurring and setting off the chain of events that leads to the eventual incident. As a result, the organization experiences fewer incidents.
  • Improve Visibility: RCA provides teams with insight into the causes of common problems. Even if these issues cannot be prevented, the team can more easily implement monitoring to detect and remediate these root causes more quickly if they occur.
  • Enhance Incident Response: An understanding of root causes also enhances the speed and effectiveness of incident response. The ability to jump directly from a problem to a root cause speeds up response and decreases the impact of the issue.

Types of Root Causes

Root causes are different from causal factors. Causal factors may contribute to an issue, but they’re not the source of the issue. Various issues can be the root cause of an incident, including:

  • Physical: An issue may be caused by a physical failure of a component or system. For example, the power supply breaking in a critical server could cause an outage of an important application.
  • Human: A human may cause an incident, either intentionally or accidentally. For example, a bad code pushed to production could break an organization’s applications.

Organizational: Incidents can also be caused by bad processes, instructions, etc. For example, an important task may accidentally go unassigned or a critical facility could be understaffed.

Root Cause Analysis Principles

When done properly, RCA can be a valuable tool for improving operations and correcting security incidents. Some key principles of RCA include:

  • Describe the problem clearly.
  • Involve all stakeholders.
  • Differentiate between causal factors and root causes.
  • Iterate and use trial and error to find root causes.

How to Perform Root Cause Analysis

Several different techniques exist for performing root cause analysis. One of the most common is the “Five Whys” method in which the team continually asks “why” something happened. This technique will help to trace back through the chain of events until there is no answer to the question “why?”. At this point, the root cause has been identified.

Visualization can also help trace the chain of events and identify potential root causes. Fishbone diagrams are a useful tool for this since they enable the team to systematically explore different potential causes of the incident.

 

Throughout the RCA process, data and context are key to success. The team will need methods to collect and organize data from multiple sources to build a timeline and identify likely causes within the chain of events leading from the root cause to the end result.

RCA with Check Point Incident Response Team

Root cause analysis requires an understanding of an organization’s systems and also of the potential causes of an issue to trace back from the result to the primary cause. Check Point’s Infinity Global Services offers a range of incident response services including root cause analysis support to help your organization find and fix the root causes of your security incidents.

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