Building an Effective Incident Response Plan: From Detection to Recovery

When a cyber incident hits, chaos ensues without a plan. Ransomware, phishing— they’ve all spiked 300% lately. An incident response (IR) plan minimizes damage and downtime. 

Foerte assists in crafting IR strategies tailored to your ops. Here’s a step-by-step to build yours, NIST-inspired. 

The Need for IR Planning 

Downtime costs $9K/minute for large firms. A plan covers: 

  • Detection: Spotting anomalies early. 
  • Containment: Isolating threats. 
  • Recovery: Back to business. 

Test it quarterly via tabletop exercises. 

Step 1: Assemble Your IR Team 

Roles: Incident commander, tech leads, legal, PR. 

  • Document contacts: Use a shared sheet or tool like PagerDuty. 

Step 2: Detection and Analysis 

Set up monitoring. 

  • Tools: Splunk or ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana). 
  • Alert on anomalies: e.g., unusual logins—grep ‘Failed password’ /var/log/auth.log. 
  • Analyze: Use Volatility for memory forensics on compromised hosts. 

Classify incidents (e.g., data breach vs. DDoS). 

Step 3: Containment, Eradication, Recovery 

  • Contain: Isolate affected systems—iptables -A INPUT -s bad-ip -j DROP. 
  • Eradicate: Remove malware with scans (e.g., ClamAV). 
  • Recover: Restore from backups—test them first! 

Step 4: Post-Incident Review 

Log lessons: What went wrong? Update plan. 

  • Metrics: Time to detect (TTD), time to respond (TTR). 

Step 5: Integration with Tools and Training 

Automate with SOAR (Security Orchestration). Train via sims.