Dincidents

Dincidents, short for digital incidents, is a term used in information risk management to describe events that affect digital systems, data, or services and have the potential to cause harm or disruption. They can be intentional, such as cyberattacks or insider threats, or accidental, such as software bugs, misconfigurations, or hardware failures. The concept emphasizes the impact on confidentiality, integrity, and availability of information and services in a managed, traceable way.

Classification and scope typically separate dincidents by domain (security, privacy, availability, integrity) and by impact (operational, financial, regulatory). Severity levels commonly range from minor to critical. Detection methods include security monitoring, anomaly detection, user reports, and automated alerts, while attribution and root cause analysis may vary by organization.

Lifecycle and response follow a standard incident management pattern: preparation, identification, containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident review. Key performance metrics often tracked are mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to respond (MTTR), and data loss or service downtime magnitude, along with recovery time objectives (RTO) and business impact.

Governance and standards intersect with broader cyber and privacy frameworks. Dincidents are typically addressed within incident response plans and may align with ISO/IEC 27035, NIST SP 800-61, and relevant privacy regulations. Public disclosure obligations depend on jurisdiction, impact, and stakeholder risk.

Challenges include definitional ambiguity and between-category overlap with cybersecurity incidents, privacy breaches, and outages. This has spurred calls for standardized taxonomies and interoperable reporting to improve benchmarking, coordination, and learning across organizations.

See also: incident management, data breach, cybersecurity, privacy incident, outage, risk management.