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What Is an Incident Response Plan (IRP)?

An IRP is a set of documented procedures detailing the steps that should be taken in each phase of incident response. It should include guidelines for roles and responsibilities, communication plans, and standardized response protocols.

Within your IRP it is important to use clear language and define any ambiguous terms. One set of terms that are frequently confused is event, alert, and incident. When using these terms in your plan, it can help to restrict use as follows:

• Event—a change in system settings, status, or communication. Examples include server requests, permissions update, or the deletion of data.
• Alert—a notification triggered by an event. Alerts can warn of suspicious events or of normal events that need your attention. For example,the use of an unused port vs storage resources running low.
• Incident—an event that puts your system at risk. For example, theft of credentials or installation of malware.

Learn more in our in-depth guide about incident response planning.

Incident Response Plan Templates

Instead of building your IRP from scratch, you can save time by starting from an IRP template. The following templates are free and are good options to consider.

Learn more in our in-depth

Incident Response Frameworks

Incident response frameworks are developed to help organizations create standardized response plans. These frameworks are typically developed by large organizations with a significant amount of security expertise and experience. Two of the best known of these frameworks are those developed by NIST and SANS.

The NIST Incident Response Framework

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a U.S. government agency dedicated to advancements in technology. As part of their cybersecurity efforts, they developed the NIST incident response framework. This framework is comprehensive, including details of how to create an IRP, an incident response team, a communication plan, and training scenarios.

This framework has four official steps which condense the 6 phases of incident response into the following:

1. Preparation
2. Detection and Analysis
3. Containment, Eradication, and Recovery
4. Post-Incident Activity

The reason for this condensation is that NIST believes that containment, eradication, and recovery are all overlapping phases. For example, as you contain threats within your systems, you should not wait to eradicate issues until all threats are found. Rather, you should contain and eliminate threats as soon as possible, even if other threats remain.

Likewise, recovery is not a strict step, rather a process that depends on the priority and content of the assets being recovered. For example, you may choose to hold off on recovering high priority assets until an attack is fully eliminated to keep your data more secure.

Learn more in our in-depth guide about NIST Incident Response.

The SANS Incident Response Framework

SysAdmin, Audit, Network, and Security (SANS) is a private organization that works to cooperatively research and educate the public on security issues. One of their major contributions to cybersecurity is the SANS incident response framework.

The SANS framework includes the six phases individually, calling the phases:

1. Preparation
2. Identification
3. Containment
4. Eradication
5. Recovery
6. Lessons Learned

Inside the SANS framework, are basic descriptions of the phases. SANS also includes an IR checklist for each phase and two templates with useful system commands for the preparation and identification phases. These templates are available for Windows and UNIX systems.

Learn more in our in-depth guide about Incident Response SANS.

What is an Incident Response Team?

An incident response team is a team responsible for enacting your IRP. This team is sometimes also referred to as a computer security incident response team (CSIRT), cyber incident response team (CIRT), or a computer emergency response team (CERT).

The key duties of your CSIRT are to prevent, manage, and respond to security incidents. This can involve researching threats, developing policies and procedures, and training end users in cybersecurity best practices.

Building a CSIRT in Your Organization

How well you build your CSIRT plays a major role in how effective your incident response efforts are. If you are unable to fill all of the necessary roles and responsibilities, your response will have gaps that can lead to more damage and longer attacks. To avoid this, you should consider developing your team with the help of the NIST guidelines.

Incident Response Team Models

According to the NIST framework, there are three different models of CSIRT you can apply:

• Central—the team consists of a centralized body that manages IR for the whole organization.
• Distributed—multiple teams exist and coordinate efforts as needed. Typically, each team is responsible for a specific part of the IT infrastructure, physical location, or department.
• Coordinated—a central team serves as a command center or knowledge base for distributed teams. Central teams often take care of system monitoring and can alert and assist distributed teams as needed. 

Selecting a Team Model

Knowing which model is best for your organization can be a challenge. To help you decide, you can again refer to the NIST guidelines which provide some considerations to help:

• What availability do you need?—you need to decide whether you want to have 24/7 response availability and what level of availability. For example, is it enough that teams can respond remotely or do they need to be on-site. Preferably your team is available in real-time and in-person.
• What level of staffing do you want?—you should decide whether you want full-time staff dedicated to your team or whether shifts of part-time staff are sufficient. Part-time staff are best for boosting team response during an incident. Full-time staff are best for ensuring that your response is organized, consistent, and immediate.
• How much expertise is needed?—the more expertise you have on your team, the more effective it can be. However, many organizations do not have a high level of security expertise in-house. If this is the case, you may want to have external experts available to assist your in-house team during response activities.
• What is your budget?—your IR budget plays a large role in limiting the above aspects. When putting your team together, you need to be realistic about the budget that is needed and how money is best allocated.

What are Incident Response Services?

Incident response (IR) services are managed services that can replace or supplement in-house teams. These services usually work on retainer with a monthly cost and a set range of services. The benefit of these services is that they typically offer a higher level of expertise than is available in-house and can provide 24/7 monitoring and response. This service usually includes a service level agreement (SLA) ensuring confidentiality and response.

Additional benefits of managed services include:

• Incident response preparation and planning—services can help you review IT systems and develop IRPs suited to your specific needs.
• Incident triage and classification—services can monitor for security events, identify incidents, and classify threats.
• Initial response—services can perform initial response steps or even come on-site to assist in-house responders.
• Post-breach assessment—services can help teams perform root-cause analyses and provide evaluations of response efforts and effectiveness.

Learn more in our in-depth guide about incident response services.

Need an incident response provider?

Cynet is a trusted partner that analyses network and endpoint data, raises alerts, and protects against a wide range of known and zero-day threats. Cynet provides CyOps, an outsourced incident response team on call 24/7/365 to respond to critical incidents quickly and effectively. Cynet can deploy its powerful endpoint detection and response (EDR) system across thousands of endpoints in up to two hours to effectively mitigate threats across an enterprise.

Incident Response Automation

Effective incident response is time-sensitive and relies on teams quickly identifying threats and initiating IRPs. Unfortunately, most teams are not capable of investing all alerts in real-time to determine if something is an incident. This can lead to incidents being missed entirely or only being caught after significant damage has occurred.

Automating parts of your incident response can help avoid this oversight or delay. It can be used to:

• Quickly triage alerts and identify incidents
• Compile and centralize relevant data for incident investigations
• Perform incident response tasks and processes, such as isolating affected areas or blocking IP addresses

Incident Response Playbooks

When automating IR, a common method you can use is to create playbooks. Playbooks are essentially scripts that team members or security solutions can follow or initiate. These scripts define response steps to be taken and instruct responders, systems, or solutions to perform the defined actions.

Playbooks can be used for:

• Manual incident response processes—playbooks define steps to be taken, including which tools should be used, which processes performed, and who is responsible for performing those actions. These playbooks can be printed or electronic and are generally specific to incident type.
• Automated incident response processes—playbooks are programmatic scripts that integrate with relevant systems and tools. When alerts are triggered or incidents are identified, the system or tool can initiate the script, automatically performing the predefined actions.

If you have manual playbooks, you can often easily transform the contained steps into automated processes. Depending on the programming knowledge of your responders, you can also use automation playbooks as backup manual playbooks as needed.

How to create an incident response playbook

When creating an incident response playbook, it should contain the following components:

• Initiating condition—the event that triggers the playbook to run. This can be an alert, an incident identification threshold, or some other event.
• Mandatory steps—the actual steps and processes to be taken. These typically include triage, analysis, containment, and removal actions.
• End state—the terminating event for the playbook. This is defined by your playbook goal. For example, resetting passwords and permissions.

Learn more in our in-depth guide about incident response playbooks.

Incident Response Platforms

In addition to playbooks, you can also employ IR platforms. These platforms are software that you can use to guide, assist, and automate your response efforts. Platforms are often comprehensive and can integrate with your existing systems.

Common features of IR platforms include:

Learn more in our in-depth guide about incident response platforms.

Automated Incident Response With Network Gate Incident Response 360

Network Gate provides a holistic solution for cybersecurity, including the Network Gate Response Orchestration which can automate your incident response policy. Users can define automated playbooks, with pre-set or custom remediation actions for multiple attack scenarios. Network Gate automated playbooks also help detect threats to ensure that you only implement a manual response when it is necessary.

Network Gate Response Orchestration can address any threat that involves infected endpoints, malicious processes or files, attacker-controlled network traffic, or compromised user accounts.

Learn more about Network Gate Response Orchestration.

Learn More About Incident Response

There’s a lot more to learn about incident response. To continue your research, take a look at the rest of our blogs on this topic:

Incident Response Process: How to Build a Response Cycle the SANS Way

The incident response process is a set of steps performed by incident response teams to prevent, detect, and mitigate security incidents. It is a recurring process that is improved with each cycle by feedback and a review of any actions taken. There may be a differing number of steps, depending on the specific process you’re using, but all processes manage the same tasks and responsibilities.

Read more: Incident Response Process: How to Build a Response Cycle the SANS Way

Incident Response Team: A Blueprint for Success

An incident response team is responsible for planning and responding to security incidents such as cyber-attacks, data breaches, and systems failures. These teams are also responsible for creating incident response plans, enforcing security policies, searching for and resolving system vulnerabilities, and evaluating security best practices. This article explains how to create effective incident response teams, and reviews the main incident response roles, and what is the difference between CERT, CSIRT, and SOC units.

Read more: Incident Response Team: A Blueprint for Success

Incident Response Template: Presenting Incident Response Activity to Management

Incident response teams need a way to easily communicate the details of a security incident to management, taking into consideration that they are not security professionals. This article provides a useful template with tables you can copy and paste into your incident response reports or presentations to management. This template will help them understand what happened in an incident, how your team responded, what remains to be done, and lessons learned.

Read more: Incident Response Template: Presenting Incident Response Activity to Management

Incident Response SANS: The 6 Steps in Depth

The SANS Institute is a private organization established in 1989, which offers research and education on information security. The SANS Institute published a 20-page handbook that outlines a structured 6-step plan for incident response. This article reviews the steps in the SANS incident response process, including preparation, identification, containment, and eradication.

Read more: Incident Response SANS: The 6 Steps in Depth

Upgrading Cybersecurity with Incident Response Playbooks

An incident response plan is a documented, systematic process that defines how your organization should deal with a cybersecurity incident. To keep your incident response plan simple, you need to ensure that your team can understand it and take the required actions under the pressure of an actual cyberattack. Therefore, many teams add incident response playbooks for specific incident scenarios.

Read more: Upgrading Cybersecurity with Incident Response Playbooks

6 Incident Response Plan Templates and Why You Should Automate Your Incident Response

It is much easier to start building your incident response plan with a template. You can remove parts that are less relevant for your organization, and fill in your details and processes. This article provides summaries and direct links to six comprehensive plan templates. You can download for free some of these templates, which can give you a head start.

Read more: 6 Incident Response Plan Templates and Why You Should Automate Your Incident Response

NIST Incident Response

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is an agency operated by the USA Department of Commerce, that provides standards and recommendations for many technology sectors. The Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) department within NIST,  is responsible for developing standards and measurement methods for IT information security.

The NIST incident response guide provides in-depth guidelines on how to build an incident response capability within an organization. The guide covers several models for incident response teams, how to select the best method, and best practices for operating the team.

Read more: NIST Incident Response

Incident Response Plan

A solid incident response process can significantly reduce the damage caused to an organization in case of an incident. An incident response plan helps distribute the incident response plan across the organization. The distribution of the plan enables all relevant stakeholders to understand and agree to the plan. They will be ready to coordinate efforts around that plan when an attack occurs. These stakeholders usually include security teams, operations, legal, and executive management, but may include others such as development teams, PR, partners and customers.

Read more: Incident Response Plan

What Is a SOC? 10 Core Functions and 6 Key Challenges

A security operations center (SOC) is a centralized facility for a team of information security specialists and IT professionals who analyze, monitor, and safeguard an organization against cyber attacks.

Understand the Security Operations Center (SOC) – key functions, team roles, critical challenges facing the modern SOC and how to overcome them.

Read more: W hat Is a SOC? 10 Core Functions and 6 Key Challenges