incidentrespons

Incident response refers to the organized set of processes and procedures used to detect, analyze, contain, eradicate, recover from, and learn from information security incidents. Its purpose is to minimize the impact on operations, data integrity, and confidence, while preserving evidence for investigation and future prevention.

A typical incident response lifecycle includes preparation, identification, containment, eradication, recovery, and post-incident learning. Preparation covers policies, roles, training, tooling, and communication plans. Identification involves monitoring, alert triage, and classifying incidents by severity and scope. Containment aims to limit spread, with both short-term and long-term strategies. Eradication removes the root cause, vulnerabilities, and artifacts. Recovery restores systems and services to normal operation, often with additional hardening. Post-incident learning analyzes root causes, updates controls, and shares lessons to reduce recurrence.

Organizations commonly establish dedicated incident response teams, such as CSIRTs or CERTs, and integrate incident response with broader security governance, risk management, and disaster recovery. Collaboration with IT, legal, communications, and management is typical to coordinate response and external disclosures, when required.

Standards and best practices inform incident response programs, including frameworks like NIST SP 800-61 and ISO/IEC 27035, which outline responsibilities, activities, and performance metrics. Key metrics include mean time to detect and mean time to respond, as well as containment time and recovery time. While incident response aims to shorten disruption and limit damage, it also emphasizes evidence preservation and continuous improvement to adapt to evolving threats.