8 Key Steps For Incident Response Planning:

Cyber threats keep getting more frequent and more sophisticated, and no organization is immune. An incident response plan (IRP) lets you detect a security incident and respond to it well. This guide walks through how to build one so your team can respond fast and keep the damage small.

Step 1: Identify Potential Threats

Start by listing the threats you face. Some come from outside, such as malware, phishing attacks or hacking attempts. Others come from inside. Think accidental data breaches or employee errors. Knowing which threats apply lets you write a plan that fits your actual needs rather than a generic checklist pulled off the internet.

Step 2: Develop an Incident Response Team

An incident response team (IRT) is central to any IRP. Pull in people from IT, legal, HR, and public relations. Give each member a clearly defined role and set of responsibilities for when an incident hits. Then appoint a team leader to coordinate the team’s work.

Step 3: Create an Incident Response Plan

An incident response plan (IRP) is a written process for handling security incidents. It sets out the steps for detecting, reporting and responding to each incident: contain it, analyze the impact, limit the damage. It also covers who tells stakeholders such as customers, partners and regulators. Include an escalation path to senior management or the board of directors, too.

Step 4: Test the Plan

A plan nobody has tested is a guess. Run regular drills and simulations so you know the plan works and everyone on the team understands their role and responsibilities when the alarm goes off. Testing also turns up gaps and weak spots. Fix them. After every real incident, hold a review and write down what to improve.

Step 5: Stay Up-to-Date

Threats change constantly. The IRP has to keep up with current security trends and best practices, so review and update it on a schedule and whenever new threats appear. When new technologies and tools become available, work them into the plan.

Step 6: Don’t Forget About Compliance

Your IRP has to meet the regulations and standards that apply to you. Under the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), you need an IRP to protect personal data. The Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) requires one from anyone who processes credit card transactions. Line the plan up with industry best practices and standards as well.

Step 7: Document Everything

Keep detailed records of every incident response activity, including notifications, the actions you took and any evidence you collected. Those records feed post-incident analysis and make the IRP better over time. A security information and event management (SIEM) system can help with detection and investigation. It helps with response, too.

Step 8: Have a Backup Plan

Even the best IRP can’t stop every incident. Plan for the worst cases, such as data loss or system downtime. Keep backups of critical data and systems. Have a disaster recovery plan ready for restoring operations after a major incident.

Putting the eight steps to work

Incident response planning is one of the core jobs in cybersecurity, and every organization needs to treat it as a priority. Work through these eight steps and you end up with a plan that lets your team detect an incident, respond to it and limit the impact.

A good IRP is never finished. It needs ongoing maintenance and testing, plus steady improvement, because threats keep changing and your plan has to change with them.

Keep compliance in view as well. GDPR and PCI DSS both expect a plan. Meeting those rules is a legal requirement, and it also shows customers and partners that you take their data seriously.

Last, write everything down and keep a backup plan. Your records drive the post-incident review. The backup plan is what gets operations running again quickly after a major incident, so the business and its customers feel less of the impact.

Attacks are rising. A tested IRP protects your data and your reputation along with your customers, and it builds a team that knows exactly what to do when something goes wrong.

Frank Jones, CISSP

Frank Jones has loved computers from the age of 13. Frank got his hacking career started when he downloaded a war dialing program that he used to detect dial up modems in his hometown of Chicago. Frank Jones now works as a JAVA coder and cyber security researcher.