Incident Response Plan: Components, Process & Template

In the second quarter of 2024, as per a report, around 1,636 cyberattacks happened every week per organization. Alarming, isn’t it?

Globally, cyberattacks are increasing at a rate of 30% annually, compromising data and causing losses in reputation and money. Therefore, it is important to create a robust security incident response plan to give attackers a tough fight and defeat them.

In this article, we’ll learn incident response planning in detail, how to create one, and important aspects like components, checklists, and templates for an incident response plan.

What Is an Incident Response Plan?

An incident response plan is an important document for organizations and security professionals to follow and stay digitally safe. It works as a comprehensive guide that details how you can effectively detect, respond to, and manage various security incidents and threats, like phishing and malware attacks, password compromises, data leaks, and so on.

An incident response plan consists of various stages, strategies, and best practices for incident response. It aims at limiting a security incident’s overall impact on your organization in terms of damages, costs, and recovery time from a cyber attack.

Why Is Incident Response Planning Important?

Prepare a well-structured, solid, and robust incident response plan for your organization to stay secure. Here are some of the reasons why you must create an incident response plan:

• Face attack fearlessly: Create a security incident plan, update it frequently, and follow it religiously to stay prepared for incidents all the time and manage them confidently.
• Faster recovery: Follow clear steps, responsibilities, and methods from your response plan to quickly recover from a security disaster.
• Stay compliant: Achieve compliance by prioritizing data security and privacy and incident response planning.
• Reduce the impact: Reduce the impact of a security incident like a data breach and lower damages by following the response plan to contain and eliminate threat vectors.
• Be transparent: Everyone in your security team can follow the same incident response plan and act according to the steps you’ve outlined in the document. This promotes transparency and effective communication.

Who Is Responsible for Incident Response Planning?

Good incident response planning is a result of brilliant minds coming from various departments of an organization. These people form a power team called – an incident response team to plan, create, and manage security incidents in real-time. This team consists of:

• Executive head: Mostly, a Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) heads the team or a board member or any other executive head of an organization.
• Technical staff: Technical staff are IT or security professionals experts in incident detection and response. This team has an incident response team lead, a coordinator, a manager, threat researchers, incident responders, forensic analysts, and security analysts.
• External staff: External staff are employees from other departments, like IT, HR, legal, PR, physical security, etc.
• Third-party staff: Third-party staff are not the employees; instead independent security consultants, legal representatives, service providers, partners, etc.

Difference Between an Incident Response Plan and a Business Continuity Plan

After an organization recognizes a security incident, an incident response plan activates quickly. On the other hand, a business continuity plan activates if the business operations of an organization are affected directly.

An incident response plan has immediate steps and strategies to respond to a cybersecurity incident or attack like data breaches, DDoS attacks, permission escalations, man-in-the-middle attacks, phishing or malware attacks, and so on.

A business continuity plan describes how to handle both external and internal incidents disrupting an organization’s operations. Examples: Natural disasters, power outages, physical security break-ins, cybersecurity attacks, pandemics, and other disruptions.

An incident response plan tells how to eliminate threats from the affected systems to limit/reduce their impact on the organization. In addition, collect evidence that the forensics team can use to assess the incident, find the root cause, and suggest strategies to prevent similar occurrences.

Business continuity planning, on the other hand, allows an organization to continue running its business after a security incident by getting various business functions back.

Components of an Incident Response Plan

The components of an incident response plan are:

• Roles and responsibilities: Define roles and responsibilities clearly and assign them to your team members when creating an incident response plan. This way, every member of the team knows their duties and how to perform them effectively while handling a cyber security incident, without confusion.
• Response methodology: Meet your security goals by creating a powerful incident response methodology and structuring it well. It should outline security measures and strategies. This will help you detect, analyze, and resolve incidents systematically in real time.
• Detailed remediation/prevention procedures: Apart from a clear methodology, document each process and procedure to remediate or prevent security incidents. These incident response procedures can be post-incident analysis, notifying teams proactively, how a specific incident escalated, preserving evidence of an attack and associated damage, and more.

What Are the Different Types of Security Incidents?

Know about the different types of security incidents when you create a robust incident response plan. Some security incidents are:

• Data breaches
• Malware like ransomware
• Phishing attacks
• Distributed denial of service (DDoS)
• Man-in-the-middle attacks
• Domain hijacking
• Crypto-jacking
• Web application attacks
• Permission escalations
• Unauthorized access
• Insider threats

The above-mentioned security incidents include both the critical ones and the minor ones. But deciding which is critical and which is minor can vary from one organization to another. Address them effectively by prioritizing them based on how critical they are for your organization.

How to Write a Cybersecurity Incident Response Plan?

A cybersecurity incident response plan process consists of both preparatory (like identifying and analyzing the incident and resolving it) as well as post-incident security activities (like assessing security gaps, modifying strategies, etc.)

Here are some cybersecurity incident response plan steps you can follow:

1. Create a Response Policy

An effective incident response policy describes at great length how you handle security incidents. It will guide your team to act proactively and make the right decisions based on what the situation demands.

So, develop your response policy first when you create your incident response plan covering:

• People: These are the people (could be internal and external) comprising your incident response team: A CISO, security analysts, a team lead, a legal team, external security consultants, etc.
• Problem: It means what indicates a security incident and how to categorize and prioritize it. An incident could be malware, ransomware, data leaks, permission escalations, system outages, insider threats, physical security breaches, and so on.

So, categorize a security incident and assign it a severity level – high, medium, or low and respond to them accordingly.

• Process: It means what processes you’ve set up in place to identify and remove incidents. For example, Risk assessment, incident identification, analysis, fixing, prevention, periodic reviews, and more.
• Procedures: It means what techniques and tools you use for incident response. Define communication protocols and tools to use, how to achieve regulatory compliance, incident detection and response (IDR) tools, and more.

2. Build Your Team

Start building your team once you have a security incident response policy in place. The team will handle security incidents when you first detect them to finally resolving it so it doesn’t repeat in the future. Outline each team member’s roles and responsibilities and share the details with them.

Your team members could belong to different departments and even outside it. Look at the following common roles in organizations:

• CISO: A CISO typically heads the team. They supervise the process and make important decisions to meet security goals.
• Incident response manager(s): They lead the team. They report to the CISO and coordinate with other team members, and make security decisions.
• Security professionals: Experts in incident detection and response, they manage technical activities. For example, security analysts, forensic analysts, incident responders, threat researchers, and more.
• Communication specialists: The professionals manage communications within the team and outside it to facilitate a smooth flow of information.

3. Risk Assessment

Perform a full-fledged risk assessment in your organization now that you have your team ready. Cover all your assets, data, and existing cyber security measures. Here’s how you can proceed:

• Identify assets: Find out critical assets, like systems, smartphones, IoT devices, digital cameras, firewalls, routers, etc. to prioritize your security efforts and achieve efficiency.
• Assess sensitive data: Identify assets with sensitive data. For example, health records, financial records, confidential business information, licenses, credentials, account information, intellectual property, and so on.
• Evaluate existing measures: Find mistakes, errors, or security loopholes that attackers can compromise by evaluating your security measures and improving on them.
• Find vulnerabilities and threats: Find out vulnerabilities and threats in your systems, networks, and processes. Measure their impacts on your organization’s operations, finances, and reputation.

4. Build Response Processes

Once you’ve assessed your organization’s current security posture, create an incident response process tailored to meet your specific needs.

• Detect: Develop a process to detect security threats or incidents. Use monitoring tools to receive real-time alerts when anything goes wrong security-wise. You can also use vulnerability scanners to spot threats or look for compromise indicators manually.

• Analyze and prioritize: If you detect a threat, analyze it carefully but proactively and assign it a priority label – high, medium, or low and respond to it accordingly.

• Contain: Set up a clear process to contain the security incident and prevent it from spreading to other devices and systems. Isolate the affected systems as soon as you realize the incident.

• Remove: It involves removing the threat and all its traces from affected systems. List incident response management software and techniques for threat removal.

• Recover: Once you remove the threat, try to bring back the system to its normal operating conditions. This helps you align with your business continuity plan.

• Learn and document: Carefully analyze the incident and learn from it. Document the case, explaining in detail the incident, its root cause, what damages it caused, and how your team handled it.

5. Set Up Communications

Set up communication strategies to ensure communication flows smoothly in your team. It keeps your team informed about activities and incidents, so you miss no important details.

In addition, establish clear communication channels with your external partners, vendors, media, and customers. Be transparent and promote trust by informing them of important, security information.

Validate your points by maintaining reports and communicating incidents to applicable authorities, regulatory bodies, and stakeholders immediately. This holds you accountable and helps you uphold your reputation in the industry.

6. Revisit and Improve the Planning

Learn what went wrong and why after a security incident. This lesson will help you understand what you could have done better to avert the incident.

In addition, you must review your current security strategies and incident response mechanisms periodically. Find out gaps in the measures and implement the lessons you’ve learned from the incident to improve your security strategies and avoid recurrences.

Take into account your organization’s structure, size, operations, risks, and technologies in use while updating your strategies.

7. Train Your Staff

Update your employees with the recent cybersecurity trends and happenings with regular training. Teach them different types of attacks or incidents and how to manage them effectively to protect your organization. This way, they would be ready to face security incidents with confidence.

In addition, you can engage your incident response team in simulation exercises to improve their incident management skills and test your strategies. So, these were the different phases of incident response planning.

How Often Should You Review Your Incident Response Plan?

Review your cybersecurity incident response planning yearly, at least. It will help you keep up with recent changes in technologies, tools, regulations, etc., and support business continuity.

Know it’s time to update the plan when the below aspects change:

• A data leak/breach
• Massive disruptions in the market due to a global/regional event like a pandemic
• Embracing remote work
• Changing your internal security team’s structure
• Adopting new tools or technologies
• Subject to a regulation like HIPAA or GDPR
• Expanding business to a new industry, country, or region

Cybersecurity Incident Response Plan Checklist

Consider the below cybersecurity incident response plan checklist and get yourself battle-ready:

• Accountability: Define all your resources – people, processes, and tools responsible for managing incidents.
• Assign roles: Assign roles to everyone in your incident response team carefully keeping in mind your security goals.
• Communication: Keep an open line of communication among your team to avoid confusion and make the process efficient.
• Learn from mistakes: Learn from an incident by finding its root cause and update your strategies accordingly.
• Continuous monitoring: Detect and neutralize incidents before they can cause harm by monitoring your data, systems, and networks continuously.

Top Incident Response Plan Template and Example

Here is an example of an incident response plan that you can use as a template for your organization:

Introduction

Explain what an incident response plan is in brief. Tell them what to expect in this document by outlining the mentioned points.

Preparation

• Build your incident response team with professionals from different departments
• Create policies, processes, and incident management procedures
• Assess your data, systems, and security measures
• Set up communications

Detect and Analyze

• Use vulnerability scanners or incident detection tools to identify threats
• Analyze, categorize, and prioritize threats

Contain, Eradicate, and Recover

• Implement strategies to contain and eliminate incidents 
• Bring the affected systems back to normal operational conditions

Communicate

Communicate the incident to internal and external stakeholders. Notify relevant authorities and regulatory bodies.

Learn and Improve

Analyze the incident and learn from mistakes to improve your incident response strategies.

Train

Train your team to handle security incidents effectively.

Conclusion

Incident response planning guides an organization in managing security incidents effectively in a way that lowers the incident’s impact on the business.

Create a powerful incident response plan for your organization. Set up a response policy, build your team, identify assets, develop response processes, improve strategies periodically, and train your staff.

Let us help you create a comprehensive cybersecurity solution to protect your organization from attacks.

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