Preparing Your Incident Response Plan

Cyberattacks can have damaging effects on an organization in multiple ways and across various facets of the business. An incident response (IR) plan can help by providing a set of instructions designed to prepare your organization for adverse events such as cyberattacks. After reading this blog, you will have a better understanding of the essential steps to include and key components to keep top of mind when creating your IR plan. 

Essential steps to include in your Incident Response plan: 

Preparation

Preparation is the first phase of IR planning, and it is the most crucial. The initial phase involves establishing and training an IR team and acquiring the necessary tools and resources. 

Identification 

The identification phase of your IR plan involves detecting and analyzing threats as soon as possible. When every minute counts, it is essential to have a strong security team and security tools to monitor and detect malicious activity throughout your network, endpoints, logs, and cloud on a 24/7 basis. If an alert is triggered, your security operations center team should review the security event for false positives and quickly triage the incident to determine the severity, type, and potential danger.

Containment and eradication 

The containment phase of your Incident Response plan includes stopping the incident, preserving evidence, collecting critical information, and reducing the impact on business operations.The eradication phase involves patching and mitigating the entry point to ensure the attacker cannot regain access. 

Response

The response phase of your IR plan involves your entire list of key stakeholders. This phase has all hands on deck because this is the crux of your IR plan when communicating the incident externally and with other internal departments.

Recovery

The recovery phase of your Incident Response plan involves returning operations to normal and conducting a post-breach investigation. Review and report on what happened, the root cause, and what could have been improved. This can reduce the time and likelihood of another incident.

For organizations that would like guidance on planning for cybersecurity incidents, Pondurance delivers IR services and guides organizations every step of the way. Learn more about IR planning in our eBook Incident Response Planning.