An incident response plan is a set of instructions to help IT staff detect, respond to, and recover from network security incidents. These plans address problems such as cybercrime, data loss, and service disruptions that threaten day-to-day work. 

What does a good incident response plan provide? 

A good incident response plan provides a course of action for all significant incidents. Some incidents lead to massive network or data breaches that can affect your organization for days or months. When a significant disruption occurs, the organization needs a detailed and comprehensive incident response plan to help IT staff quickly stop, contain, and control the incident. 

If your network has not yet been threatened, it will be. You know the chaos that can follow a cyber attack if it has. Whether the threat is virtual (security breaches) or physical (power outages or natural disasters), data loss or functionality can be crippling. 

Incident response and disaster recovery plans help you mitigate risk and prepare for various events. 

Criteria for creating an effective incident response plan 

Regardless of the organization’s size, having a comprehensive approach to incident response is crucial to surviving the attack and reducing the impact and costs of recovery. 

Most importantly, the incident response plan must be practical enough for your organization to act quickly and effectively in the event of a compromise. 

An effective incident response plan should meet the following criteria: 

• Simple but precise. 
• Detailed roles and responsibilities. 
• Bring together technical and non-technical teams. 
• Provide a classification framework. 
• Understand the business priority. 

Incident response steps 

Incident response is a process, not a one-time event. For an incident response to be successful, teams must take a coordinated and organized approach to any incident. 

There are five essential steps that every response program should cover to effectively address the wide range of security incidents a company might experience. 

1. Preparedness 

Preparation is the key to effective incident response. Even the best incident response team cannot effectively address an incident without predetermined guidelines. 

2. Identification 

The focus of this phase is to monitor security events to detect, alert and report potential security incidents. 

3. Containment  

This is the most critical stage of incident response. The containment and neutralization strategy is based on the intelligence and indicators of compromise gathered during the analysis phase. 

4. Eradication 

Once the computer security incident is prevented from spreading further, it is completely eradicated from the system. 

5. Restore  

Resources should be used to recover data from compromised tools and systems so that everything is restored to how it was before the incident occurred. 

6. Post-incident activity 

There is more work to be done after the incident is resolved. Be sure to properly document any information that can be used to prevent similar events from occurring.