Incident response concerns your ability to respond to a data breach, cyberattack, or other threat to your data, systems, and reputation. It also includes the way that you will attempt to mitigate the consequences of the attack, breach, or other potentially disastrous incident. A good incident response plan needs to be in place before an event, and tested so that all of your team can do their vital work with confidence during a crisis. It will include advance preparation in the event of a cybersecurity incident, mechanisms for detection and reporting the incident, triage and analysis (including who should do what in response to different scenarios), steps for containment and neutralization, and monitoring of post-incident activity to ensure the incident has been truly contained.
Incidents can occur in even the best protected systems and most proactive security postures. Some real world examples include customers receiving emails addressed to someone else, a login attempt with ten failures, or an intern finding and sharing a salary database with their entire department. A strategic and thoughtful incident response plan will help make sure that you are alerted when something does happen so that you can respond to it quickly in order to minimize reputational, financial, or punitive consequences.
SPIO provides tracking templates to help you manage any incident from discovery through closeout, so that you can identify how bad the incident is, whether there is a potential breach, and how any incident can be mitigated and managed. We also offer a detailed process guide that even includes editable communications templates so that you can get ahead of any incident before it does real damage to your reputation.