Creating and maintaining an incident response playbook can significantly improve the speed and effectiveness of your organization's incident response.
To help, here's a crash course on what incident response playbooks are, why they are important, how to use them and how to build them.
An incident response playbook defines common processes or step-by-step procedures needed for your organization's incident response efforts in an easy-to-use format.
Playbooks are designed to be actionable, meaning they quickly tell incident response team members what actions they need to perform under different circumstances.
A playbook might have plays for formally declaring an incident, collecting and safeguarding digital evidence, eradicating ransomware or other malware from an environment and coordinating a data breach announcement with the PR team, as well as many other steps.
A playbook provides a single, authoritative, up-to-date source of instructions for all personnel with incident response roles and responsibilities.
Incident response playbooks aren't just valuable for responding to actual incidents; they typically have other uses.
Playbooks are great assets to get new staff up to speed on how your organization conducts incident response activities.
In an incident response tabletop exercise, participants can reference particular plays to indicate how they would act in a real situation.
Review publicly available incident response playbooks to see which activities they document, how much detail they provide on each activity and how they organize the sets of activities.
Many organizations opt to use playbooks that follow the phases of the NIST incident response framework: preparation, detection and analysis, containment, eradication and recovery, and post-incident activity.
Gather your existing policies, procedures and other documentation related to incident response activities.
The more detailed the plays are - and the more comprehensive the playbook is - the more effort it takes to create and maintain.
One method for building a playbook is to list all potential response actions to a particular incident, as well as their correlating processes and procedures.
Ensure incident response playbooks are easy to read and use.
If steps are unclear or complicated, team members could struggle to complete their necessary tasks during an incident and delay response times.
Conduct post-incident analysis and feedback to review how well a playbook worked against a real and unscripted incident.
Gather feedback from everyone who used the playbook to determine how well it informed them of the various steps to take and if anything proved confusing or unwieldy.
As you build your playbooks, be sure to get feedback from the people who will be using the playbook.
If your playbook is hard to use, it could be more of a hindrance than a help, so their input on plays and playbook drafts is invaluable.
This Cyber News was published on www.techtarget.com. Publication date: Fri, 05 Jan 2024 19:13:04 +0000