What Is Incident Response Life Cycle? Everything You Need to Know


Incident response is a plan for methodically responding to a cybersecurity incident. Measures are taken to rapidly contain, mitigate, and learn from the harm if an event is nefarious.

However, not every cybersecurity incident requires an investigation as they are not always serious. Certain events such as a single login failure by an employee on site does not need an in-depth investigation as it is not a major issue. However, it is important to keep a record of all these instances for future investigations.

Learning about the incident response life cycle and its framework will help you and your organization understand the accessibility of sensitive information, thereby allowing you to prevent breaches and mitigate threats by educating others and identifying vulnerabilities.

The incident response life cycle is a step-by-step process undertaken by a company to detect and respond to a service interruption or security threat. It is imperative to have an incident response plan in place to ensure data protection, avoid a breach of information, and protect the organization from being infiltrated.

Incident Response Plan Steps

It is always necessary to be prepared for a data breach incident as these days it has become a very common phenomenon. Incident response can be stressful when a vital asset is involved and you know that there is a potential danger. Incident response measures help in effective containment and recovery in these intense, high-pressure conditions. Response time is important for damage prevention; so, it is best to formulate certain incident response plan steps.

There are two institutes whose incident response management steps have become industry standards: NIST and SANS.

NIST Incident Response Process

NIST is an acronym for the National Standards and Technology Institute. It is a government agency that functions in various technical domains like cybersecurity. It is popular for its incident reaction measures, the steps of which are:

  1. Preparation: Develop and implement necessary methods to protect critical infrastructure.
  2. Detection and analysis: To keep a regular check on systems, information assets, data, and operations, and manage security risks…

Source…