Incident Response Plan 101: The 6 Phases, Templates, and Examples

What is an incident response plan?

An incident response plan (IRP) is a set of instructions that helps IT staff respond to, detect, and recover from network security incidents. The goal of an IRP is to minimize the impact of a security incident on an organization.

An IRP can help an organization:

• Protect data: Ensure that sensitive data is protected in the event of a data breach, with sufficient backup
• Reduce costs: Minimize the cost of recovery, as well as the financial impact of security incidents.
• Reduce damage: Minimize the damage and duration of a security incident
• Improve recovery time: Reduce the time it takes to recover from a security incident
• Identify stakeholders: Identify the relevant stakeholders in the event of a security incident
• Simplify digital forensics: Streamline digital forensics processes
• Reduce negative publicity: Reduce negative publicity and customer churn

The primary steps in an IRP include:

• Preparation: Preparation is a key step in an effective response
• Detection and analysis: Put security safeguards in place
• Containment: Minimize the scope of the security incident
• Eradication: Eliminate the root cause of the security incident
• Recovery: Recover from the security incident
• Post-incident activity: Perform activities after the incident
• Testing: Test the incident response process

The U.S. National Cyber Incident Response Plan (NCIRP) is an example of a government-driven approach to handling major cyber incidents. It addresses the role of the private sector, state and local governments, and federal agencies in responding to incidents.

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Why is an incident response plan important?

The Ponemon Institute’s Cost of Cyber Crime Study showed that the typical organization experiences an average of 145 security incidents per year and spends $13 million annually year to defend itself. An effective response process can act to significantly reduce these costs. Incident response planning also protects your company’s reputation. IDC found that 80% of consumers would take their business elsewhere if directly affected by a data breach. If a security breach is not handled properly, the company risks losing business, as well as investor and shareholder confidence.

Additional benefits of incident response plans include:

• Data protection — securing backups, ensuring sufficient identity and access management, and timely patching of vulnerabilities.
• Cost reduction — According to a study by IBM, the average cost of a breach is $4.35 million. Incident response planning can significantly reduce this cost by limiting the damage caused by an attack.
• Reduced damage — The IRC ensures that the security team is ready to address security incidents, allowing them to respond faster and minimize the potential damage of an attack.
• Improved recovery time — Having an established and well-designed plan makes it easier to implement recovery procedures, potentially speeding up the process of restoring systems after a security incident.
• Communication with stakeholders: The plan should identify the relevant stakeholders that need to be informed in the event of a security incident. This makes it easier to ensure adequate communication and maintain compliance with security regulations.
• Digital forensics — An IRP makes it easier to implement digital forensics, as it provides a blueprint of how the company’s security measures work. It also provides an indication of areas addressed by existing security measures and can highlight potential gaps.
• Reduced negative publicity — Effective incident response shows a brand’s commitment to security and privacy, and can save a company’s reputation in the event of a breach. This also helps reduce customer churn.

What are the incident response steps?

According to the SANS Institute’s Incident Handlers Handbook, there are six steps that should be taken by the Incident Response Team, to effectively handle security incidents.

1. Preparation – Perform a risk assessment and prioritize security issues, identify which are the most sensitive assets, and which critical security incidents the team should focus on. Create a communication plan, document roles, responsibilities, and processes, and recruit members to the Cyber Incident Response Team (CIRT).

2. Detection and analysis– The team should be able to effectively detect deviations from normal operations in organizational systems, and when an incident is discovered, collect additional evidence, decide on the severity of the incident, and document the “Who, What, Where, Why, and How”.

3. Containment – Once the team identifies a security incident, the immediate goal is to contain the incident and prevent further damage:

• Short-term containment — for example, isolating network segments or taking down infected production servers and handing failover.
• Long-term containment — applying temporary fixes to affected systems to allow them to be used in production, while rebuilding clean systems.

4. Eradication – The team must identify the root cause of the attack, remove malware or threats, and prevent similar attacks in the future. For example, if a vulnerability was exploited, it should be immediately patched.

5. Recovery – The team brings affected production systems back online carefully, to ensure another incident doesn’t take place. Important decisions at this stage are from which time and date to restore operations, how to verify that affected systems are back to normal, and monitoring to ensure activity is back to normal.

6. Post-incident activity – This phase should be performed no later than two weeks from the end of the incident, to ensure the information is fresh in the team’s mind. The purpose of this phase is to complete documentation of the incident, investigate further to identify its full scope, understand where the response team was effective, and areas that require improvement.

7. Further testing – After an incident has been resolved and post-incident activities are completed, further testing is crucial to validate the effectiveness of the response plan. This involves running simulations and drills to test the incident response processes, ensuring that all team members are familiar with their roles and responsibilities.

Incident response planning typically includes:

• The organization’s incident response strategy and how it supports business objectives
• Roles and responsibilities involved in incident response
• Procedures for each phase of the incident response process
• Communication procedures within the incident response team, with the rest of the organization, and external stakeholders
• How to learn from previous incidents to improve the organization’s security posture

An incident response plan forms the basis of your incident response cycle:

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