What is an incident response framework?
An incident response framework is a blueprint that helps organizations deal with security incidents in a structured and efficient way. It outlines the steps to take before, during, and after an incident, and assigns roles and responsibilities to different team members. Incident response frameworks comprise step-by-step breakdowns of how to respond to dangerous cyber events.
For example, most incident response frameworks, including the NIST Cybersecurity Framework and the SANS Institute incident response framework, have variations of preparation, detection, and remediation steps.
In the past few years, many businesses have suffered the consequences of having informal, undefined, or non-existent incident response plans. The repercussions of suboptimal incident response plans include massive data breaches, data privacy failures, and the loss of customers and clients. With the threat landscape continuously evolving, no enterprise can afford to have an informal or poor incident response plan.
According to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach 2023, 51% of surveyed enterprises plan to invest in incident response planning and testing. However, businesses need to remember that merely acknowledging the importance of incident response as a critical cybersecurity process is insufficient. In some cases, even investing in incident response isn’t enough. To truly establish secure incident response processes, businesses must adopt and meticulously follow standardized practices. That’s where incident response frameworks come in.
By using the best incident response frameworks, organizations can focus on innovation and cloud-based growth without fear of threat actors and other cyber threats stifling their success.
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What issues do incident response frameworks mitigate?
Weak incident response protocols: If a business’s existing incident response capabilities, protocols, and playbooks miss the mark, their cloud environments become vulnerable to myriad cyber threats like phishing, malware, ransomware, and supply chain attacks. Furthermore, poor incident management will result in delayed recovery time during incidents.
Overwhelmed IT and cybersecurity teams: Without a standardized approach to incident response, in-house teams and security operations centers (SOCs) may conduct inadequate risk assessments, focus on the wrong issues, leave vulnerabilities exposed, or waste time and resources on ineffective recovery and remediation activities.
Complicated cyber forensics: When cyber incidents occur, businesses must understand the root cause of the incident to keep similar attacks from happening in the future. However, with haphazard incident response plans, forensics teams will struggle to make sense of cyber incidents and subsequent incident response activities.
Inconsistencies: Many enterprises already have techniques, incident response tools, and protocols for responding to certain threats, attacks, and incidents. Still, if businesses use them inconsistently, it can result in direct and indirect complications that hinder remediation efforts and cause longer-lasting damage.
Imbalanced cybersecurity capabilities: Incident response isn’t the be-all and end-all of an enterprise’s cybersecurity posture and capabilities. That said, it’s a critical aspect of cybersecurity, and the lack of an effective incident response plan can have widespread consequences.
Almost every other pillar of cybersecurity will lose potency if an enterprise’s incident response plan isn’t rock solid. By adopting an incident response framework, businesses can ensure that their cybersecurity capabilities are uniformly effective and complement each other.
What are some popular incident response frameworks?
NIST Cybersecurity Framework (NIST CSF)
NIST CSF is a tool created by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a branch of the U.S. Department of Commerce and a renowned source of cybersecurity resources.
NIST’s Information Technology Laboratory (ITL) developed a robust incident response framework in a special publication called the Computer Security Incident Handling Guide.
NIST’s incident response life cycle is composed of four steps:
Preparation involves preventing incidents and preparing to handle incidents.
Detection and analysis focuses on attack vectors, signs of a breach, precursors, indicators, documentation, and incident prioritization.
Containment, eradication, and recovery includes containment strategies, evidence gathering, and attacker identification.
Post-incident activity summarizes lessons learned and leverages incident data and evidence for security optimization.
SANS Institute incident response framework
The SANS (SysAdmin, Audit, Network, and Security) Institute is a for-profit American enterprise founded by Alan Paller in 1989. Like NIST, the SANS Institute provides a diverse range of cybersecurity frameworks, resources, certifications, and training programs.
In principle, the SANS Institute incident response framework is similar to NIST’s framework. However, unlike the NIST framework, the SANS framework features a six-step cycle:
Preparation focuses on preparing security policies, tools, incident response teams, and more.
Identification includes threat detection, awareness, monitoring, and pinpointing unusual traffic and processes.
Containment focuses on patching exploited vulnerabilities, assessing criticality, stopping bleeding, and isolating compromised systems.
Eradication involves identifying root causes, restoring backups, and removing malware.
Recovery involves reverting to the baseline, returning to normal operations, and monitoring and documenting the process comprehensively.
Lessons learned includes formalizing and assessing documentation and reports, and focusing on process- rather than people-optimization for future incidents.
CIS Controls: Critical Security Controls for Effective Defense
The Center for Internet Security (CIS) is a nonprofit organization founded in 2000. CIS is committed to providing public and private enterprises with resources to battle the world’s most potent cyber threats.
Unlike frameworks provided by NIST and SANS that break down incident response into a four-step and six-step cycle, CIS Controls list incident response as one of 18 critical cybersecurity safeguards.
As per CIS Critical Security Control 17, the main aspects of robust incident response include policies, plans, procedures, defined roles, training, and communications. According to CIS, there are nine parts to a comprehensive incident response plan:
Establishing key cybersecurity personnel and incident responders
Managing the contact information of important stakeholders
Implementing a standardized incident reporting process
Establishing and maintaining a comprehensive incident response process
Assigning roles and responsibilities across IT, security, incident response, compliance, and human resources teams
Establishing communication mechanisms and protocols for incident response
Planning and implementing incident response simulations
Conducting meticulous post-incident analyses and reviews
Establishing cyber incident thresholds for data breaches, privacy incidents, etc.
The Continuous Improvement (CI) Framework
Created by Google IR’s team, the Continuous Improvement Framework puts a slightly different spin on other incident response resources and templates. The Continuous Improvement Framework focuses on continuous and constant optimization to ensure that an enterprise’s cybersecurity capabilities are mature and always ready to respond to incidents.
Some key aspects of the Continuous Improvement Framework include well-established escalation paths, updated playbooks, the availability of security tools, strong stakeholder partnerships, and comprehensive root cause analyses.
The Continuous Improvement Framework has five steps:
Response strategy includes cataloging response strategies for different kinds of cyber threats.
Critical phases involve framing critical incident response phases.
Measurements and metrics selection (KPIs) focuses on establishing data points and objectives to evaluate the success of each phase.
Procedural health assessment involves collaborating with stewards/owners of each phase of incident response to evaluate the current state and identify gaps.
Gap analysis report and planning input includes triaging gaps and weaknesses based on criticality and sharing information with key stakeholders.
How to build the optimal incident response plan
The incident response frameworks we’ve discussed are powerful ways to combat cyber threats. But they’re just a starting point: Businesses must meticulously assess various options and choose an incident response framework that can best serve their unique security needs. Even choosing a marginally superior or more relevant incident response framework can provide significant cybersecurity advantages.
Remember that businesses have no obligation to follow an incident response framework in any way that doesn’t suit them. Businesses can and should mix and match elements of various incident response frameworks if required. In certain cases, a few steps from one framework or playbook may suit an enterprise’s needs more than another, and it’s a good idea to customize incident frameworks based on individual goals.
Still, no matter which framework an enterprise chooses, the framework is only a guide. To implement the security activities outlined in frameworks, organizations need an incident response policy and plan. Incident response policies and plan templates can be useful tools to get started. Some options include:
U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s National Cyber Incident Response Plan
Carnegie Mellon University’s Computer Security Incident Response Plan
University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center’s PCI DSS Incident Response Plan
University at Buffalo’s Information Security Incident Response Plan
University of California, Berkeley’s Incident Response Plan
Our 7 IR Plan Templates and Examples blog post is another resource that covers additional incident response templates from the California Government Department of Technology, the National Institute of Health (NIH), and more.
How Wiz can help you make the most of your incident response framework
Regardless of the framework you choose, Wiz provides robust capabilities and support across the entire incident response life cycle. Wiz provides several key capabilities to support incident response in cloud environments, including:
Cloud-native detection and analysis: Wiz continuously monitors cloud workloads and activity logs to detect potential threats and suspicious behavior. It leverages threat intelligence and attack path analysis to prioritize alerts based on their potential impact. Learn more ->
Contextualized threat visibility: The Wiz Security Graph correlates threats across real-time signals and cloud activity, providing a unified view to help defenders understand attacker movement and the full context of an incident.
Automated evidence collection: Wiz can automatically collect important forensic evidence when a resource is potentially compromised, including copying VM volumes and downloading relevant logs and artifacts. This speeds up the initial triage process.
Root cause and blast radius analysis: Using its Security Graph, Wiz provides automated analysis to help identify how a resource was compromised (e.g. exploited vulnerability, stolen credentials) and calculate the potential blast radius - showing where an attacker could potentially move in the environment and the potential business impact. Learn more ->
Cloud-native response capabilities: Wiz offers pre-built and customizable response playbooks for common cloud threats, allowing teams to quickly contain and eradicate threats using cloud-native actions. Learn more ->
Runtime monitoring and forensics: The Wiz Runtime Sensor provides container forensics and runtime execution data to help investigate incidents and understand their scope.
Comprehensive visibility: Wiz can discover unknown or rogue cloud resources across multiple cloud providers, helping ensure full coverage during incident response.
By combining these capabilities, Wiz aims to streamline cloud incident response by reducing alert fatigue, shortening investigation times, and enabling faster containment and eradication of threats in cloud environments. Get a demo now to see how Wiz can support your incident response processes.
