What are the Essential Stages of Incident Response Plan?

An incident response plan is a document with a set of guidelines and action strategies to follow in case of a cyber-attack. Panicking when you have encountered a cyber-attack is quite common. You might fail to understand the basics and take the steps to culminate the attack.

An incident response plan serves as a guide and offers step-by-step insights to help authorities take control of the situation. However, it is not as simple either. You must possess specific skills and expertise to follow the plan, or you can simply rely on the experts for perfect support.

Dig deeper into the details of this article to get your hands on the essential stages of an incident response plan and mitigate the risks of cybersecurity breaches efficiently.

Top 6 Stages of Incident Response Plan You Should Not Skip

Cyber-attacks are becoming more common with every passing day. Developing strategies to mitigate the threats is the top priority of all officials. However, you must also have an incident response plan in case the attack occurs, and you fail to mitigate it before that point.

Here are the major stages of an incident response plan you should not skip to achieve your goal smoothly.

Preparation

Preparation is the basic stage of an incident response plan that needs due attention and expertise. Devising a plan of action in the middle of a cybersecurity attack is overwhelming even for experts, let alone ordinary officials. It will only lead to a waste of time and offer privileges to the attackers. Due to this, you must do a risk assessment of critical security aspects and formulate an incident response plan beforehand. Organizations need to be prepared to handle any type of attack, which is impossible without the support of experts. This is why authorities invest in managed detection and response services and ensure experts have a perfect incident response plan.

Identification

Identification is the most critical stage of an incident response plan you should never ignore or take lightly. Identifying a threat and analyzing its nature, impact, and severity is more than necessary to devise a response plan. You must identify potential threats, risks, and attacks your setup can face to move toward their mitigation. Identifying the threat or attack when it has occurred is pointless as it will only help you in face-saving and will not limit the loss. You can opt for penetration testing or managed detection to identify the potential attacks and prepare to mitigate them.

Containment

Containment is the next stage of an incident response plan you should never miss. The first instinct of many authorities after facing a cyber-attack is to delete all data and shut the system down. However, it only leads to loss of valuable data and does not support risk mitigation. You must identify the breach, analyze the conditions, and devise plans according to evidence. All of this is possible when you do not delete the data but only disconnect the infected systems. You can also change access control credentials and create data backup. Disable the remote access to contain the threat and limit your loss.

Eradication

Eradication is the next and most important stage of an incident response plan you should know about. Once you have identified and contained the threat, you must eradicate it to ward off the threat of data loss and breaches. It involves cutting off the problem and restoring the harmed systems or setups. You must reimage the hardware to wipe out the malicious content and eradicate the possibility of any subliminal attack. You must eliminate the chances of reinfection and take active measures to protect your data and setup for the future. You can leave it to the experts if you lack essential skills.

Recovery

Recovery is another significant stage of an incident response plan you should never take lightly. You cannot just relax after containing and eradicating a threat. You must bring your systems back online to resume your business activity smoothly. Make sure to test and monitor the infected system efficiently to keep future threats at bay. Moreover, inform the users of any data breach so they can take active measures to avoid potential scams, threats, or other breaches.

Retesting

Retesting is the last stage of the incident response plan you should never skip or ignore. Retesting the incident response plan is crucial to look for errors or gaps for improvement in the plan. It is also a great opportunity to fine-tune the plan and fix the issues before implementing it in a real situation. Retesting must encompass all security aspects of the organization. You can utilize the findings and analysis of retesting to improve the process and culminate the recurrence of attacks. You can hire managed detection and response services and rely on experts for the perfect support if you lack skills and expertise in the area.

Do You Have an Incident Response Plan?

An incident response plan is formulated after monitoring the threats. If you lack insights about it, feel free to contact the experts and get them on board to manage your system and cyberspace and ensure its security at all times.