Incident Response Playbook
Incident response playbooks provide organizations with a structured approach to effectively handle and respond to security incidents. By following these step-by-step guidelines, organizations can establish a comprehensive incident response process that ensures quick detection, containment, investigation, and mitigation of incidents. This playbook covers all stages of the incident response lifecycle, from preparation to continuous improvement, and emphasizes the importance of communication, collaboration, and learning from each incident
Step 1: Preparing for Incidents
- Establish an Incident Response Team (IRT) consisting of key stakeholders from various departments, such as IT, legal, HR, and communications. Ensure that the team is equipped with the necessary skills and expertise to handle different types of incidents.
- Develop a comprehensive incident response plan that outlines roles, responsibilities, and communication channels within the IRT. This plan should cover all stages of the incident response process, from detection to recovery.
- Conduct regular tabletop exercises and simulations to test and refine the incident response process, involving both the IRT and relevant stakeholders. These exercises will help identify any gaps or weaknesses in the plan and provide an opportunity to train team members.
Step 2: Identifying and Classifying Incidents
- Implement a wide range of monitoring tools and techniques to detect potential security incidents. This may include intrusion detection systems, log analysis, threat intelligence feeds, and security information and event management (SIEM) solutions. Regularly update and fine-tune these tools to stay ahead of emerging threats.
- Establish incident classification criteria based on severity, impact, and urgency. This will help prioritize incidents and ensure that the appropriate level of response is applied. Consider factors such as data sensitivity, potential regulatory implications, and potential harm to the organization’s reputation.
- Develop a user-friendly reporting mechanism for employees to report suspected incidents. Encourage a culture of proactive incident reporting by providing clear guidelines on what constitutes an incident and ensuring that employees feel comfortable reporting any potential incidents they come across.
Step 3: Assessing and Containing Incidents
- When an incident is detected, promptly gather and document relevant information, such as the affected systems, potential data breaches, and the initial scope and impact of the incident. This information will be crucial for understanding the nature of the incident and developing an effective response strategy.
- Activate the IRT and assign clear roles and responsibilities to team members for containment and investigation. Ensure that each team member understands their role and has the necessary authority and resources to carry out their tasks effectively.
- Isolate affected systems, networks, or assets to prevent further damage or spread of the incident, while minimizing disruption to critical business operations. This may involve temporarily shutting down compromised systems or disconnecting them from the network to prevent further compromise.
Step 4: Investigating and Mitigating Incidents
- Conduct a thorough and systematic investigation to determine the root cause, extent, and potential impact of the incident. This may involve technical experts, forensic analysts, and legal counsel, depending on the nature and severity of the incident. Document all findings and maintain a chain of custody for any evidence collected.
- Preserve all relevant evidence and document findings in a secure and organized manner, ensuring compliance with legal and regulatory requirements. This includes maintaining logs, capturing network traffic, and preserving any physical or digital evidence that may be needed for further analysis or potential legal action.
- Develop and implement appropriate mitigation measures to address identified vulnerabilities, weaknesses, or gaps. This may involve patching systems, updating security controls, or revising policies and procedures to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future. Regularly review and update these measures to adapt to evolving threats and changes in the organization’s environment.
Step 5: Communicating and Reporting Incidents
- Establish a comprehensive communication plan to ensure timely and accurate information flow to stakeholders. This should include internal teams, executives, customers, partners, and regulatory authorities. Clearly define communication channels and protocols to ensure that the right information reaches the right people at the right time.
- Prepare detailed incident reports that provide a clear and concise overview of the incident, response actions taken, and lessons learned. These reports will serve as valuable references for future incidents and help facilitate informed decision-making and continuous improvement. Consider including recommendations for improving the incident response process based on the lessons learned.
- Share relevant information with appropriate regulatory bodies or law enforcement agencies, if necessary, in accordance with legal and contractual obligations. This may involve reporting data breaches, cooperating in investigations, or providing evidence to support legal proceedings. Ensure that all necessary steps are taken to protect the organization’s legal interests and maintain compliance with relevant regulations.
Step 6: Learning and Improving
- Conduct a thorough post-incident review to identify areas for improvement in the incident response process. This should include evaluating the effectiveness of the response, identifying any gaps or weaknesses, and determining opportunities for process optimization.
- Update the incident response plan and associated documentation based on lessons learned from each incident. Incorporate any new tools, techniques, or best practices that have been identified during the post-incident review. Regularly review and update the plan to address emerging threats, industry best practices, and specific organizational needs.
- Provide regular training and awareness programs to educate employees on incident response best practices. This will help foster a culture of security and vigilance throughout the organization and ensure that all employees understand their roles and responsibilities in the event of an incident. Consider conducting simulated exercises to reinforce training and improve response readiness.
Remember, incident response is an ongoing and iterative process. Regularly review and update your playbook to address emerging threats, industry best practices, and specific organizational needs. Continuously monitor your environment for potential threats and be prepared to adapt and respond effectively to any incidents that may arise.
Here are a few resources that may be helpful as well.
All-In-One Tools
- Belkasoft Evidence Center – The toolkit will quickly extract digital evidence from multiple sources by analyzing hard drives, drive images, memory dumps, iOS, Blackberry, and Android backups, UFED, JTAG, and chip-off dumps.
- CimSweep – Suite of CIM/WMI-based tools that enable the ability to perform incident response and hunting operations remotely across all versions of Windows.
- CIRTkit – CIRTKit is not just a collection of tools, but also a framework to aid in the ongoing unification of Incident Response and Forensics investigation processes.
- Cyber Triage – Cyber Triage remotely collects and analyzes endpoint data to help determine if it is compromised. Its agentless approach and focus on ease of use and automation allow companies to respond without major infrastructure changes and without a team of forensics experts. Its results are used to decide if the system should be erased or investigated further.
- Dissect – Dissect is a digital forensics & incident response framework and toolset that allows you to quickly access and analyze forensic artifacts from various disk and file formats, developed by Fox-IT (part of NCC Group).
- Doorman – osquery fleet manager that allows remote management of osquery configurations retrieved by nodes. It takes advantage of osquery’s TLS configuration, logger, and distributed read/write endpoints, to give administrators visibility across a fleet of devices with minimal overhead and intrusiveness.
- Falcon Orchestrator – Extendable Windows-based application that provides workflow automation, case management and security response functionality.
- Flare – A fully customizable, Windows-based security distribution for malware analysis, incident response, penetration testing.
- Fleetdm – State of the art host monitoring platform tailored for security experts. Leveraging Facebook’s battle-tested osquery project, Fleetdm delivers continuous updates, features and fast answers to big questions.
- GRR Rapid Response – Incident response framework focused on remote live forensics. It consists of a python agent (client) that is installed on target systems, and a python server infrastructure that can manage and talk to the agent. Besides the included Python API client, PowerGRR provides an API client library in PowerShell working on Windows, Linux and macOS for GRR automation and scripting.
- IRIS – IRIS is a web collaborative platform for incident response analysts allowing to share investigations at a technical level.
- Kuiper – Digital Forensics Investigation Platform
- Limacharlie – Endpoint security platform composed of a collection of small projects all working together that gives you a cross-platform (Windows, OSX, Linux, Android and iOS) low-level environment for managing and pushing additional modules into memory to extend its functionality.
- Matano: Open source serverless security lake platform on AWS that lets you ingest, store, and analyze petabytes of security data into an Apache Iceberg data lake and run realtime Python detections as code.
- MozDef – Automates the security incident handling process and facilitate the real-time activities of incident handlers.
- MutableSecurity – CLI program for automating the setup, configuration, and use of cybersecurity solutions.
- nightHawk – Application built for asynchronous forensic data presentation using ElasticSearch as the backend. It’s designed to ingest Redline collections.
- Open Computer Forensics Architecture – Another popular distributed open-source computer forensics framework. This framework was built on Linux platform and uses postgreSQL database for storing data.
- osquery – Easily ask questions about your Linux and macOS infrastructure using a SQL-like query language; the provided incident-response pack helps you detect and respond to breaches.
- Redline – Provides host investigative capabilities to users to find signs of malicious activity through memory and file analysis, and the development of a threat assessment profile.
- SOC Multi-tool – A powerful and user-friendly browser extension that streamlines investigations for security professionals.
- The Sleuth Kit & Autopsy – Unix and Windows based tool which helps in forensic analysis of computers. It comes with various tools which helps in digital forensics. These tools help in analyzing disk images, performing in-depth analysis of file systems, and various other things.
- TheHive – Scalable 3-in-1 open source and free solution designed to make life easier for SOCs, CSIRTs, CERTs and any information security practitioner dealing with security incidents that need to be investigated and acted upon swiftly.
- Velociraptor – Endpoint visibility and collection tool
- X-Ways Forensics – Forensics tool for Disk cloning and imaging. It can be used to find deleted files and disk analysis.
- Zentral – Combines osquery’s powerful endpoint inventory features with a flexible notification and action framework. This enables one to identify and react to changes on OS X and Linux clients.
