What should be included in an incident response plan?

It may be useful to implement an incident response program template that is based on the well-known NIST or SANS incident response plans.

An incident response plan should include an overall guide for responding to cyber security incidents. 

The plan should include:

• Roles and responsibilities

The incident response plan should specify which tasks are delegated to which people in the event of a cyber attack that requires disclosure. 

An incident recovery team is a group of people assigned to implement the cyber breach response plan. The team is responsible for the characterization of incidents, determining their impact on policies and procedures, and complying with reporting requirements. Generally, these are members of the IT staff who collect and perform a forensic analysis of incident-related data. 

• Detection and Analysis

This is a key section of the plan. The cyber incident management plan should provide documentation to explain what constitutes a cyber incident and how it is detected, reported, and initially contained. This section is usually theoretical, as there is no way to know exactly what a potential cyber incident will look like.

• Containment, Eradication, Recovery

This crucial section is the technical and detailed part of the plan. In this portion, a strategy for threat containment and eradication. It should also contain documentation on the recovery process in the aftermath of the attack. A summary of the tools, technologies, and physical resources at play in the response plan should be included here.

• Incident Communication

The incident notification plan includes a detailed guide for handling the communication of the incident to relevant parties. This entails third-party vendors, law enforcement, regulators, and cybersecurity consultants.

• In Retrospect

After the incident response plan is activated and the cyber threat response is implemented, it’s time to reflect on what points of failure allowed the breach to happen. This will help prevent similar attacks in the future.