An incident response playbook standardizes responses to specific incident types with procedures that include particular actions organizations must take to prepare for, respond to, and recover from different incident types.
Incident response playbooks are just like sports playbooks. While incident response playbooks contain specific guidelines for particular incidents, sports playbooks have detailed plays for handling different team actions.
Read More about an Incident Response Playbook
An incident response playbook should define specific actions security teams need to take during each incident response phase and the team or individual responsible for acting.
What Are the Different Types of Incident Response Playbooks?
Creating incident response playbooks requires evaluating an organization’s risks and prioritizing them based on severity and impact. The common types include ransomware, data breach, data loss, malware infection, denial-of-service (DoS), insider threat, social engineering, website compromise, and zero-day vulnerability playbooks.
Is an Incident Response Playbook the Same as an Incident Response Plan?
While an incident response playbook and an incident response plan are closely related, they are not the same.
An incident response plan is primarily more strategic than a playbook. The plan contains high-level frameworks and overarching strategies for handling incidents, while the playbook provides detailed, step-by-step procedures for responding to specific incidents.
What Are the Benefits of an Incident Response Playbook ?
An incident response playbook provides several advantages. First, it ensures an organization follows a consistent incident response process. A single, central, written manual is critical to ensure staff members work together effectively and stay on the same page. The plan provides step-by-step guidelines to follow in case an incident occurs, preventing employees from skipping important steps.
Such a playbook also speeds up response time, minimizing the damage and duration of an attack and helping return operations to normal as soon as possible. As a result, it can help reduce bad press and customer breach of trust.
An incident response playbook helps security teams investigate after an incident occurs. It helps them understand what may have gone wrong. More importantly, they will be more prepared to address similar security issues better in the future. Proper documentation also provides an audit trail that can help organizations avoid regulatory fines and other penalties.
What Are the Steps in Creating an Incident Response Playbook ?
Creating an incident response playbook requires four steps:
- Preparation;
- Detection and analysis;
- Containment, eradication, and recovery;
- Post-incident activity.
Step #1: Preparation
This phase involves incident prevention, vulnerability management, user awareness, and malware infection prevention. Preparing different field sets for each incident type is a good idea.
First, define roles related to the incident type and escalation scenarios. Try to dedicate communication tools to contact stakeholders. The response team needs adequate access to security and IT systems, analysis software, and other resources. Organizations may employ automation and integrations into security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) systems to respond timely and avoid human error.
Step #2: Detection and Analysis
Detection involves collecting data from IT systems, security tools, public information, and people inside and outside the organization. Security teams must then identify precursors and indicators. It primarily requires configuring a monitoring system to detect specific incident types.
Analysis involves documentation, triage, investigation, and notification. Documenting incidents and responses to define fields for analysis and how to fill them once an incident is detected and registered in the incident management system. After that, the response team can triage incidents to prioritize and categorize them, perform false positive checks, and search for related incidents. The incident data should comply with the rules for detecting specific suspicious behaviors. Mismatches may be tagged as false positives.
Investigations comprise logging, asset and artifact enrichment, and incident scope forming. Analysts should collect all incident data to determine the threat’s entry point. At this point, investigators can enrich the data with threat Intelligence. Next, they need to measure risks to identify who needs to be involved in mitigation.
As the final step, the security team must notify every stakeholder so system owners can step in with effective containment and recovery measures.
Step #3: Containment, Eradication, and Recovery
Containment primarily keeps situations under control after incidents occur. The response team should know the correct containment measures based on an incident’s severity and damage potential. Defining workflows provides a list of object types and possible actions. Analysts perform different actions, such as deleting malicious files, preventing their execution, performing network host isolation, disabling accounts, scanning disks aided by security software, and more.
Eradication and recovery mean to put systems back into operation. Eradication includes cleaning up all attack traces following an intrusion. Recovery, meanwhile, requires response teams to adopt a business-as-usual stance. The security team performs health checks and revokes changes made during the attack.
Step #4: Post-Incident Recovery
Post-incident activity simply means learning lessons. It helps security teams improve processes, update the existing knowledge base, enhance detection and prevention mechanisms, and adjust the next plan.
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An incident response playbook is critical to hastening threat mitigation and remediation, enabling organizations to return to business as usual.
Key Takeaways
- An incident response playbook standardizes responses to specific incident types.
- Creating such a playbook follows four steps—preparation; detection and analysis; containment, eradication, and recovery; and post-incident activity.
- Organizations need to keep up with incident response given that threats continue to evolve and multiply, which may not be feasible if they don’t have an incident response playbook handy.
Sources
- https://www.fortinet.com/blog/ciso-collective/incident-response-plans-playbooks-policy
- https://panorays.com/blog/new-guide-third-party-incident-response-playbook/
- https://securelist.com/developing-an-incident-response-playbook/109145/
