Incident Response Template: Presenting Incident Response Activity to Management

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Incident response is a critical, highly sensitive activity in any organization. When security incidents happen, especially if they turn into major breaches involving damage to the organization and its clients, management needs to get involved. Senior managers will want to understand the impact of the incident and react to it.

As a leader, or member, of an incident response team, you’ll need a way to easily communicate the details of a security incident to management, taking into consideration that they are not security professionals.

This page provides a useful template with tables you can copy and paste into your reports or presentations to management, that will help them understand what happened in an incident, how your team responded, what remains to be done, and lessons learned.

When a major security incident occurs in your organization, you will be required to report to management about what happened during the incident, how the threat was mitigated and key systems recovered, and what are the lessons learned for next time.

It is important to communicate about the incident to your management both during the response, and after its conclusion. This will give them full visibility and knowledge into the event and its potential risk.

In this page, we provide a template you can use to clearly report to management about a major security incident, how it was handled, next steps and lessons learned.

Also be sure to check out our guide to incident response planning, and our list of incident response plan templates created by leading organizations.

How to Use the Template

Here is how to use our template to create your incident report for management:

The template is built from tables you need to fill up in respect to your specific use case.
For prolonged investigations or incidents with many details, you can provide several reports, each covering a certain part of the incident investigation, each with its own threat and risk, containment, eradication and lessons learned.
When entering free text, please be as concise as possible
Make sure you remove any placeholder text before presenting the template.

1. Threat and Risk

Specify what happened in the incident, how you detected the threat, and the potential risk.

INCIDENT INVESTIGATION
	Compromise	Privilege Escalation	Credential Theft	Lateral Movement	Data Access	Data Exfiltration
Threat				V
Details			SaaS account was compromised	Pass the Ticket – XXX server was accessed

THREAT DETECTION
	IN-HOUSE		3RD PARTY
	Security Product Alert	Security Team Proactive
Details	EDR raised an alert	Analyst spotted anomalous outbound traffic	FBI notification

POTENTIAL RISK
Free text explaining the type of incident Example: Detected lateral movement might indicate an active malicious presence in the environment as well as other compromised assets

2. Investigation Next Steps

Indicate who is managing the incident, whether there is a dedicated budget for responding or remediating the threat, and explain the next steps in the incident investigation process.

THREAT TYPE
	In-House	IR Service Provider
Case Manager

DEDICATED BUDGET
Purpose	Sum

INVESTIGATION DIRECTIONS
Free text in respect to the incident type Example: Check if the compromised account has accessed sensitive resources Examine outbound communication from the infected endpoints etc.

INVESTIGATION DIRECTIONS

Free text in respect to the incident type

Example:

Check if the compromised account has accessed sensitive resources
Examine outbound communication from the infected endpoints
etc.

ESTIMATED TIMELINE

3. Containment

Discuss which part of the environment was penetrated, and what was done to contain the damage.

ROOT CAUSE
Weaponized Email	v
Malicious website	x
Stolen credentials
Insider

THREAT TYPE
Scope		Actions Taken
Number of compromised endpoints	2	Take offline
Number of compromised servers	3	Take offline
Number Compromised user accounts	5	Disable & Reset Password
Number of encrypted endpoints		Reimage
Number of encrypted servers		Reimage

Current Status	all discovered compromised entities are mitigated
Next Steps	investigate the attack’s scope

4. Eradication

Specify what was done, or planned to be done, to remove the threat in the interim phase, how it will be eradicated for good, and the success rate of different types of attacks conducted as part of the incident.

Interim Eradication

INTERIM STATUS
	Mass Ransomware	Malware	Compromised User Accounts	Malicious Outbound Traffic
Malicious Activity Type	XXX endpoints encrypted	XXX instances	XXX accounts	XXX sessions to XXX addresses
Status	54% back in production	92% removed	100% disabled and password reset	100% blocked

NEXT STEPS
	Mass Ransomware	Malware	Compromised User Accounts	Malicious Outbound Traffic
Malicious Activity Type	XXX endpoints encrypted	XXX instances	XXX accounts	XXX sessions to XXX addresses
Status	Continue reimaging

Final Eradication Plan

MALICIOUS INFRASTRUCTURE & ACTIVITY REMOVED
	Mass Ransomware	Malware	Compromised User Accounts	Malicious Outbound Traffic
Malicious Activity Type	XXX endpoints encrypted	XXX instances	XXX accounts	XXX sessions to XXX addresses
Status	100% reimaged	100% removed	100% reset	100% blocked

ATTACK DETAILS AND SUCCESS RATE
	Details	Attack Success Rate
Data Theft	Insert info here	Insert info here
Extortion
Cryptomining
Banking Credentials Harvesting
Sabotage
Other (specify)

5. Recovery

Explain your plan for returning affected endpoints, servers, apps, and other organizational assets to production.

	Disabled/non available	Back to Production
Endpoints	Insert info here
Servers
Apps
Cloud workloads
User accounts
Data

6. Lessons Learned

Summarize the incident – what was the impact on the organization, what were the root causes that allows the attack to happen, the final timeline of the incident, and most importantly – what went well in the incident management process and what needs to be improved next time.

OVERALL ATTACK IMPACT
	Damage	Details
Man hours	Insert info here	Insert info here
Payment to 3rd party
Data loss
Computing charges for cloud provider
Production downtime
Fines (per respective regulation)

Attack Enablers	Recommendations
Lack of sufficient security technology	Implement EDR\Deception\UBA\Network Analytics\XDR\other
User insecure behavior	Train users on security best practices
Other (specify)	Implement EDR\Deception\UBA\Network Analytics\XDR\other

FINAL ATTACK TIMELINE
Initial Compromise date	Insert date here

	Initial Compromise > Identification	Identification > Containment	Containment > Eradication	Eradication > Recovery
Time to conclude	Insert time here

		Identification	Containment	Eradication	Recovery
POINTS TO REPRODUCE
POINTS TO IMPROVE	Challenge
POINTS TO IMPROVE	Recommendation

Automated Incident Response with Cynet

Cynet provides a holistic solution for cybersecurity, including the Cynet Response Orchestration which can automate your incident response policy. Users can define automated playbooks, with pre-set or custom remediation actions for multiple attack scenarios. Cynet automated playbooks also help detect threats to ensure that you only implement a manual response when it is necessary.

Cynet Response Orchestration can address any threat that involves infected endpoints, malicious processes or files, attacker-controlled network traffic, or compromised user accounts.

Learn more about Cynet Response Orchestration.