What Is an Incident Response Plan (IRP)?

An incident response plan is a set of documented procedures detailing the steps that should be taken in each phase of incident response. It should include guidelines for roles and responsibilities, communication plans, and standardized response protocols.

Within your plan it is important to use clear language and define any ambiguous terms. One set of terms that are frequently confused is event, alert, and incident. When using these terms in your plan, it can help to restrict use as follows:

• Event—a change in system settings, status, or communication. Examples include server requests, permissions update, or the deletion of data.
• Alert—a notification triggered by an event. Alerts can warn of suspicious events or of normal events that need your attention. For example,the use of an unused port vs storage resources running low.
• Incident—an event that puts your system at risk. For example, theft of credentials or installation of malware.

Why Is an Incident Response Plan Important?

Organizations without an incident response plan often find themselves unprepared when incidents occur, leading to poorly coordinated response efforts, extended resolution times, and serious reputational damage. Recent high-profile data breaches demonstrate numerous examples of this:

• Organizations were informed of vulnerabilities ahead of time but took little or delayed action
• Public statements minimized the true severity of incidents, only to be disproven later by deeper investigations
• Communications with stakeholders were inconsistent, inducing confusion, anxiety, and anger among customers and the public alike
• Organizational leaders did not properly manage incidents, whether by failing to take them seriously or through inappropriate actions worsening the reputational damage

An effective incident response plan goes beyond just a technical exercise. It must reflect the larger business objectives, operational needs, and risk appetite of the organization. By integrating strategic and operational perspectives into incident management, leaders can respond more decisively to incidents, reducing operational disruption and limiting data losses.

Furthermore, when faced with external scrutiny—from regulators, media, customers, or investors—organizations can demonstrate accountability and robust due diligence by showcasing a documented and well-executed incident response plan, affirming that they have responsibly managed and learned from incidents.

What are examples of Security Incidents?

There are many types of cybersecurity incidents that could result in intrusions on an organization’s network:

1. Unauthorized Attempts to Access Systems or Data: Occurs when an individual or group attempts to gain unauthorized access to an organization’s systems or data. Examples include hacking attempts, brute force attacks, and social engineering.
2. Privilege Escalation Attack: Occurs when an attacker is able to gain access to a system with limited privileges and then uses that access to gain higher-level privileges. This can be done by exploiting vulnerabilities in the system or using stolen credentials.
3. Insider Threat: Occurs when a current or former employee, contractor, or other insider uses their access to an organization’s systems or data for malicious purposes. Examples include stealing sensitive information or sabotaging systems.
4. Phishing Attack: Occurs when an attacker sends an email or message that appears to be from a legitimate source, but is actually a trap to steal sensitive information or spread malware.
5. Malware Attack: Occurs when an attacker uses malware, such as a virus or Trojan horse, to gain access to an organization’s systems or data or perform other malicious activities. Different types of malware can perform different activities. For example, ransomware can prevent access to data until a ransom has been paid.
6. Denial-of-Service (DoS) Attack: Occurs when an attacker floods a system or network with traffic, causing it to become unavailable to legitimate users.
7. Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) Attack: Occurs when an attacker intercepts and alters communications between two parties. The attacker can steal sensitive information or spread malware this way.
8. Advanced Persistent Threat (APT): A sophisticated and targeted attack designed to gain access to an organization’s systems or data, often with the goal of stealing sensitive information or maintaining a long-term presence.

Learn more in our detailed guide to security stacks.

Incident Response Steps: 6 Phases of the Incident Response Lifecycle (According to SANS)

In the introduction to this article we discussed two main options for an IR process, the NIST incident response process with four steps and the SANS incident response process with six phases.

According to SANS, there are six phases to incident response. These six steps occur in a cycle each time an incident occurs. The steps are:

1. Preparation of systems and procedures
2. Identification of incidents
3. Containment of attackers and incident activity
4. Eradication of attackers and re-entry options
5. Recovery from incidents, including restoration of systems
6. Lessons learned and application of feedback to the next round of preparation

Learn more in our detailed guide to incident response policy.

Preparation

The first step is to review existing security measures and policies to determine effectiveness. This involves performing a risk assessment to determine what vulnerabilities currently exist and the priority of your assets. This information is then applied to prioritize responses and reconfigure systems so that high-priority assets are protected.

This phase is also where you write new policies and procedures and refine existing ones. These procedures include a communication plan and assignment of roles and responsibilities during an incident.

Identification of threats 

When an incident is detected, team members need to work to identify the nature of the attack, its source, and the goals of the attacker.

During identification, any evidence collected needs to be protected and retained for later in-depth analysis. Responders should document all steps taken and evidence found in detail. This can help you more effectively prosecute if an attacker is identified.

Communication plans are also typically initiated at this phase, informing security members, stakeholders, authorities, legal counsel, and eventually users of the incident and what steps need to be taken.

Learn more in our detailed guide to incident response analyst.

Containment of threats

After an incident is identified, containment methods are determined and enacted. The goal is to advance to this stage as quickly as possible to minimize the amount of damage caused.

Containment is often accomplished in sub-phases:

• Short term containment—immediate threats are isolated in place. For example, the area of your network that an attacker is currently in may be segmented off. Or, a server that is infected may be taken offline and traffic redirected to a failover.
• Long term containment—additional access controls are applied to unaffected systems. Meanwhile, clean, patched versions of systems and resources are created and prepared for the recovery phase.

Elimination of threats

During and after containment, the full extent of an attack is made visible. Once teams are aware of all affected systems and resources, they can begin ejecting attackers and eliminating malware from systems. This phase continues until all traces of the attack are removed. In some cases, this may require taking systems off-line so assets can be replaced with clean versions in recovery.

Recovery and restoration

In this phase, teams bring updated replacement systems online. Ideally, systems can be restored without loss of data but this isn’t always possible.

In the latter case, teams must determine when the last clean copy of data was created and restore from it. The recovery phase typically extends for a while as it also includes monitoring systems for a while after an incident to ensure that attackers don’t return.

Feedback and refinement

The lessons learned phase is one in which your team reviews what steps were taken during a response. Members should address what went well, what didn’t, and make suggestions for future improvements. Any incomplete documentation should also be wrapped up in this phase.

Learn more in our detailed guide to incident response certification.

Key Incident Response Technologies

EDR and XDR

Endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools continuously monitor endpoints such as servers, desktops, laptops, and mobile devices for suspicious behaviors. EDR collects detailed endpoint telemetry, analyzing it to uncover attack indicators and support rapid mitigation actions. 

Extended detection and response (XDR) broadens the scope by aggregating data across multiple security layers, including endpoints, network devices, cloud workloads, and email systems. By correlating information from varied sources, XDR provides a comprehensive view of incidents, allowing responders to pinpoint threats, understand attack chains, and swiftly apply containment strategies.

SIEM

Security information and event management (SIEM) platforms gather and analyze data from network hardware, infrastructure, applications, endpoints, and cloud environments, aggregating logs into centralized storage. SIEM tools correlate events from diverse data sources to identify patterns, anomalies, or threats. 

During incident response, SIEM alerts analysts about suspicious activities, providing necessary context to facilitate incident investigation and remediation steps. SIEM platforms also serve as an audit trail, retaining log data essential for forensic investigations, regulatory compliance, and post-incident analysis.

SOAR

Security orchestration, automation, and response (SOAR) platforms automate routine and repetitive tasks involved in incident handling. SOAR enables analysts to define workflows—known as playbooks—that automatically execute actions such as isolating compromised hosts, blocking malicious IP addresses, initiating malware scans, and revoking suspicious user credentials. 

Automation speeds up incident response, ensures consistent execution of remediation steps, and frees security personnel to prioritize complex incident analysis. Additionally, SOAR tools document incident-handling procedures, improving transparency and helping teams review and refine future incident responses.

UEBA

User and entity behavior analytics (UEBA) technologies analyze normal user and entity patterns to detect anomalous activities indicative of security threats. Using techniques such as machine learning and statistical analysis, UEBA systems uncover insider threats, account compromise, lateral movement, database misuse, and other anomalies typically missed by traditional rule-based tools. 

During incident response, UEBA identifies suspicious behaviors early, allowing analysts to intervene before significant damage occurs. Furthermore, behavioral analytics helps incident responders understand attacker actions, measure the scope of a breach, and discover previously undetected compromise vectors.

Attack Surface Management

Attack surface management (ASM) tools continuously evaluate an organization’s externally exposed IT assets, identifying vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, neglected resources, or unauthorized shadow IT. By proactively identifying security weaknesses, ASM tools enable defenders to remediate these exposures before attackers exploit them. 

During incident response, ASM tools help teams quickly map external-facing assets, comprehensively assess the exposure landscape, and pinpoint attacker entry points. Continuously updated visibility and accurate asset tracking facilitate faster containment, eradication, and recovery efforts, ensuring secure restoration of affected systems and reducing susceptibility to follow-on attacks.

Incident Response Plan Templates

What is an incident response plan template?

An incident response plan template is a blueprint organizations can use to build and execute their incident response plan. The template is a document that includes a framework, guidelines, steps and procedures to follow in case of a security incident. It can also include pre-built checklists, communication plans, and roles/responsibilities. With the incident response template, organizations have a clear plan guiding them through detection, containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident review, in case of a data breach or cyber attack.

Where Can I Find Incident Response Templates?

Free incident response templates are widely available online, often provided by cybersecurity vendors, government agencies like CISA or NIST, and professional communities. Using them can save time and provide structure during high-stress events. They also help ensure that critical steps aren’t missed, like evidence preservation or regulatory notification. For teams just getting started with incident response, templates can be a great teaching tool and a foundation to build a more customized incident response plan over time.

Whichever template you choose, it’s recommended to adapt it to your specific infrastructure, team size, or legal obligations. In addition, it’s recommended to rehearse the template in tabletop exercises and update them regularly based on lessons learned and changing threat landscapes. Otherwise, over-reliance on a generic template might give a false sense of preparedness.

Learn more in our in-depth guide about incident response templates.

Incident Response Frameworks

Incident response frameworks are developed to help organizations create standardized response plans. These frameworks are typically developed by large organizations with a significant amount of security expertise and experience. Two of the best known of these frameworks are those developed by NIST and SANS.

The NIST Incident Response Framework

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is a U.S. government agency dedicated to advancements in technology. As part of their cybersecurity efforts, they developed the NIST incident response framework. This framework is comprehensive, including details of how to create an IRP, an incident response team, a communication plan, and training scenarios.

This framework has four official steps which condense the 6 phases of incident response into the following:

1. Preparation
2. Detection and Analysis
3. Containment, Eradication, and Recovery
4. Post-Incident Activity

The reason for this condensation is that NIST believes that containment, eradication, and recovery are all overlapping phases. For example, as you contain threats within your systems, you should not wait to eradicate issues until all threats are found. Rather, you should contain and eliminate threats as soon as possible, even if other threats remain.

Likewise, recovery is not a strict step, rather a process that depends on the priority and content of the assets being recovered. For example, you may choose to hold off on recovering high priority assets until an attack is fully eliminated to keep your data more secure.

The SANS Incident Response Framework

SysAdmin, Audit, Network, and Security (SANS) is a private organization that works to cooperatively research and educate the public on security issues. One of their major contributions to cybersecurity is the SANS incident response framework.

The SANS framework includes the six phases individually, calling the phases:

1. Preparation
2. Identification
3. Containment
4. Eradication
5. Recovery
6. Lessons Learned

Inside the SANS framework, are basic descriptions of the phases. SANS also includes an IR checklist for each phase and two templates with useful system commands for the preparation and identification phases. These templates are available for Windows and UNIX systems.

What Does an Incident Response Team Do?

An incident response team is a team responsible for enacting your IRP. This team is sometimes also referred to as a computer security incident response team (CSIRT), cyber incident response team (CIRT), or a computer emergency response team (CERT).

The key duties of your CSIRT are to prevent, manage, and respond to security incidents. This can involve researching threats, developing policies and procedures, and training end users in cybersecurity best practices.

Learn more in our detailed guide to incident response management.

Building a CSIRT in Your Organization

How well you build your CSIRT plays a major role in how effective your incident response efforts are. If you are unable to fill all of the necessary roles and responsibilities, your response will have gaps that can lead to more damage and longer attacks. To avoid this, you should consider developing your team with the help of the NIST guidelines.

Incident Response Team Models

According to the NIST framework, there are three different models of CSIRT you can apply:

• Central—the team consists of a centralized body that manages IR for the whole organization.
• Distributed—multiple teams exist and coordinate efforts as needed. Typically, each team is responsible for a specific part of the IT infrastructure, physical location, or department.
• Coordinated—a central team serves as a command center or knowledge base for distributed teams. Central teams often take care of system monitoring and can alert and assist distributed teams as needed. 

Selecting a Team Model

Knowing which model is best for your organization can be a challenge. To help you decide, you can again refer to the NIST guidelines which provide some considerations to help:

• What availability do you need?—you need to decide whether you want to have 24/7 response availability and what level of availability. For example, is it enough that teams can respond remotely or do they need to be on-site. Preferably your team is available in real-time and in-person.
• What level of staffing do you want?—you should decide whether you want full-time staff dedicated to your team or whether shifts of part-time staff are sufficient. Part-time staff are best for boosting team response during an incident. Full-time staff are best for ensuring that your response is organized, consistent, and immediate.
• How much expertise is needed?—the more expertise you have on your team, the more effective it can be. However, many organizations do not have a high level of security expertise in-house. If this is the case, you may want to have external experts available to assist your in-house team during response activities.
• What is your budget?—your IR budget plays a large role in limiting the above aspects. When putting your team together, you need to be realistic about the budget that is needed and how money is best allocated.

Learn more in our detailed guide to csirt.

What are Incident Response Technologies?

Incident Response Technologies are tools and platforms that help organizations detect, investigate, respond to, and recover from cybersecurity incidents. These technologies aim to automate and streamline the process of identifying threats, containing them quickly, and minimizing damage to systems, data, and operations.

Common types of incident response technologies include:

• ASM (Attack Surface Management) – Tools that scan the organization’s digital assets, across systems, data, and infrastructure, to identify entry points and any vulnerabilities. These could include misconfigured cloud assets, shadow IT, open ports, and more. ASM gives security teams visibility into their true attack surface, helping them reduce blind spots and mitigate risks.
• EDR (Endpoint Detection and Response) – Platforms that monitor endpoint activity in real-time to detect suspicious behavior, investigate threats and block threats like malware or ransomware. EDRs provide security teams with visibility and protection and the endpoint and workload level.
• SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) – Systems that collect and analyze log data from across an organization’s IT environment, centralizing alerts for security teams. They correlate events to detect patterns indicative of a security incident and support compliance reporting. SIEMs provide visibility and insight into threat detection and response, and are especially useful in large and complex networks.
• SOAR (Security Orchestration, Automation and Response) – Platforms that automate security tasks and responses across systems. They use playbooks to triage alerts, assign incidents and even trigger automated containment actions. This reduces response time and likelihood of errors, and eases the burden on security analysts.
• UEBA (User and Entity Behavior Analytics) – Solutions that use machine learning to establish baselines of normal behavior for users and systems, then flag anomalies that could signal insider threats or compromised accounts. Unlike rule-based detection, UEBA adapts to evolving behaviors and catches subtle signs of threats. It’s particularly useful for spotting lateral movement and privilege abuse.
• XDR (Extended Detection and Response) – Platforms that unify detection and response into a single platform. XDRs correlate and analyze data from endpoints, the network, the cloud, and any other organizational digital assets. They provide a holistic view of an attack, including very sophisticated attacks, and accelerate investigation and response.

What are Incident Response Services?

Incident response (IR) services are managed services that can replace or supplement in-house teams. These services usually work on retainer with a monthly cost and a set range of services. The benefit of these services is that they typically offer a higher level of expertise than is available in-house and can provide 24/7 monitoring and response. This service usually includes a service level agreement (SLA) ensuring confidentiality and response.

Learn more in our in-depth guide about incident response services.

Need an incident response provider?

Cynet is a trusted partner that analyses network and endpoint data, raises alerts, and protects against a wide range of known and zero-day threats. Cynet provides CyOps, an outsourced incident response team on call 24/7/365 to respond to critical incidents quickly and effectively. Cynet can deploy its powerful extended endpoint detection and response (XDR) system across thousands of endpoints in up to two hours to effectively mitigate threats across an enterprise.

Incident Response Automation

Effective incident response is time-sensitive and relies on teams quickly identifying threats and initiating IRPs. Unfortunately, most teams are not capable of investing all alerts in real-time to determine if something is an incident. This can lead to incidents being missed entirely or only being caught after significant damage has occurred.

Automating parts of your incident response can help avoid this oversight or delay. It can be used to:

• Quickly triage alerts and identify incidents
• Compile and centralize relevant data for incident investigations
• Perform incident response tasks and processes, such as isolating affected areas or blocking IP addresses

Incident Response Playbooks

When automating IR, a common method you can use is to create playbooks. Playbooks are essentially scripts that team members or security solutions can follow or initiate. These scripts define response steps to be taken and instruct responders, systems, or solutions to perform the defined actions.

Playbooks can be used for:

• Manual incident response processes—playbooks define steps to be taken, including which tools should be used, which processes performed, and who is responsible for performing those actions. These playbooks can be printed or electronic and are generally specific to incident type.
• Automated incident response processes—playbooks are programmatic scripts that integrate with relevant systems and tools. When alerts are triggered or incidents are identified, the system or tool can initiate the script, automatically performing the predefined actions.

If you have manual playbooks, you can often easily transform the contained steps into automated processes. Depending on the programming knowledge of your responders, you can also use automated playbooks as backups to manual playbooks as needed.

Learn more in our in-depth guide about incident response playbooks.

Incident Response Platforms

In addition to playbooks, you can also employ IR platforms. These platforms are software that you can use to guide, assist, and automate your response efforts. Platforms are often comprehensive and can integrate with your existing systems.

Common features of IR platforms include:

Learn more in our in-depth guide about incident response platforms.

What is Generative AI in Incident Response?

Generative AI can automate and accelerate incident response by generating contextual responses to incidents in real-time. Instead of relying on predefined rules or static playbooks, LLMs can interpret data in real time, understand the context of an alert or incident, and generate dynamic responses based on current conditions.

Generative AI can help analyze attacks, write incident reports, suggest remediation steps, summarize logs, and even automate communication with relevant stakeholders. This cuts down on manual analysis time and adds another insight layer, which both support security team decision-making. In high-pressure environments where minutes matter, this assistance can be extremely valuable.

Given the sensitive nature of security attacks, it’s recommended to treat generative AI as a co-pilot. This means keeping human security analysts in the loop to review GenAI recommendations, contributing their own insights and ultimately making the final call. This human-in-the-loop approach ensures that generative AI enhances response efforts without compromising oversight, accountability, or the nuance required in high-stakes situations.

In addition, generative AI can be used for practicing and playing out various incident response drills, to help prepare humans for real scenarios.

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.

See Our Additional Guides on Key Data Security Topics

Together with our content partners, we have authored in-depth guides on several other topics that can also be useful as you explore the world of data security.

EDR Tools

Authored by Cynet

• [Guide] EDR Security: Protecting the Network From Endpoint Threats
• [Guide] 10 Reasons Your Business Needs Endpoint Protection Software
• [Announcement] Cynet MITRE ATT&CK Results 
• [Product] Cynet All-In-One Cybersecurity Platform 

Endpoint Security

Authored by Cynet

• [Guide] Endpoint Security
• [Guide] What Is Endpoint Management? MDM, EMM, and UEM
• [Ebook] 2024 Cybersecurity Planning Checklist 
• [Product] Cynet All-In-One Cybersecurity Platform 

Endpoint protection

Authored by Cynet

• [Guide] Top 6 Endpoint Protection Platforms and How to Choose
• [Guide] Endpoint Protection: The Basics and 4 Key Technologies
• [Product] Cynet All-In-One Cybersecurity Platform