What are incident response playbooks?
An incident response playbook is a document outlining clear steps for security teams to follow when responding to and resolving security incidents such as malware infections, unauthorized access, denial-of-service attacks, data breaches, or insider threats.
Differences between playbooks, plans, and policies
Because security terminology isn’t always standardized, the following table explores the distinctions between three commonly confused terms related to incident response: “policy,” “plan,” and “playbook.”
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| Aspect | Playbook | Plan | Policy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scope | Actionable steps to handle a specific security incident scenario | Reference to guide overall incident response tactics | Rules and procedures for strategically handling security and compliance |
| Content | Detailed, step-by-step instructions for responding to specific security incidents | Broad strategy and framework specifying key actions and processes | Organization-wide rules, guidelines, and expectations |
| Detail level | Highly specific and operational | Less detailed and more comprehensive than playbooks | High-level and strategic; rarely changes |
| Quantity | Numerous specific playbooks for each scenario | Separate plans for separate business units and/or physical locations | Single overarching security policy |
How do incident response playbooks make your organization safer?
Without detailed, step-by-step IR playbooks, an organization’s response to a security incident may be chaotic, leading to delays, errors, or overlooked critical steps. A haphazard response may allow more minor issues to escalate, resulting in steeper financial losses and even reputational damage if user experience is compromised or data is breached.
On the other hand, effective incident response playbooks provide clear, actionable steps for teams to follow in the heat of a security incident scenario, ensuring
Faster incident response time,
Less damage from security breaches, and
More (and more efficient) collaboration among teams.
Common scenarios you should create playbooks for
Your organization will need to create separate playbooks tailored to different attack vectors and other incident scenarios. Here are a few top priorities that IR playbooks can address:
Denial-of-service attacks
Credential compromise
Malware infection
Data theft
Insider threats
Beyond creating playbooks for specific types of incidents, playbooks can also provide instructions for different teams. While security and IT teams may follow a playbook covering the technical side of things, the legal team will need guidance for meeting compliance requirements, and your PR team needs clear processes to handle communications around the incident.
Playbook examples/templates across the web
When it’s time to create a playbook for your organization, it’s better to start with pre-built playbook examples or templates. This saves the time and trouble of drafting from scratch, makes sure nothing falls through the cracks, and provides a solid foundation to customize your own organization-specific IR playbook. Many experts provide playbook examples and templates to the security community at no charge.
NIST and the U.S. Federal Government
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has created a wide range of very thorough, expert-vetted materials dedicated to cybersecurity and incident response:
Guide to Malware Incident Prevention and Handling for Desktops and Laptops
Data Breach Response: A Guide for Business (from the Federal Trade Commission, aimed at small businesses)
Federal Government Cybersecurity Incident & Vulnerability Response Playbooks (from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Agency)
CERT Société Générale
The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) of the French multinational banking and financial services corporation Société Générale offers a range of publicly available playbooks for scenarios ranging from worm infections to trademark infringement.
Major cloud providers
Most major cloud providers offer example playbooks for scenarios relevant to their customers. However, any provider-specific resources should be approached with caution, since they may not adapt well to the multi-cloud environments that most organizations are running today. For example, AWS offers a playbook resources hub with samples, templates, and development workshops.
Other sources
SANS institute’s Mathieu Saulnier offers an excellent repository of freely available playbooks.
Other governments outside of the U.S. may also make IR playbook templates available at no charge to the public through their cybersecurity departments.
Components of an incident response playbook
Most playbooks group actions into stages, as determined by an industry-standard incident response framework, such as those from SANS and Verizon (VERIS).
In this section, we’ll highlight a couple of examples to show what types of activities are recommended for each phase of the SANS Institute’s IR workflow.
1. Preparation
Establish inventories of tools and assets.
Ensure you have real-time visibility over your environment: Assess both your collection of activity logs and your runtime visibility from any sensors deployed to make sure you do not have blind spots.
2. Detection
Identify threat vectors and risk factors based on your organization’s threat model.
Categorize and triage malware.
Monitor for suspicious or unusual patterns of credential use.
3. Identification
Verify and prioritize the incident according to its relative severity.
Determine the scope of the incident, MITRE ATT&CK technique, and more.
Gather and analyze indicators of compromise (IOCs) and map them to known threat actors.
4. Containment and eradication
Determine the relevant containment action depending on the type of attack and the relevant tools you have in place covering the affected assets (such as cloud detection and response).
For host-level incidents, runtime response and blocking specific processes may be effective.
For incidents affecting cloud assets, consider isolating compromised entities using security group settings or rotating credentials for compromised identities.
5. Recovery
Rebuild affected systems: In traditional environments, this may mean wiping machines and reinstalling software. In containerized cloud-based environments, this may mean updating container images to clean, secured versions and redeploying your workloads.
Restore service.
Patch and update defenses.
6. Post-incident activities
Update any relevant policy and procedures.
Review and harden your defensive posture.
Conduct a thorough root-cause analysis with all stakeholders, including IT, development, and security operations teams, to ensure that the incident does not recur in the future.
Commonly overlooked best practices for cloud IR playbooks
When creating playbooks for cloud incident response scenarios, certain best practices are often overlooked, yet they are crucial for ensuring an effective and comprehensive response. Here are some of these overlooked best practices:
1. Multi-Cloud Compatibility
What's overlooked: Organizations often focus on a single cloud provider when developing playbooks.
Best practice: Ensure your playbook is adaptable to multi-cloud environments, accounting for the unique controls, tools, and processes of each cloud provider. This includes defining roles, responsibilities, and communication channels across different cloud platforms.
2. Cloud-Specific Logging and Monitoring
What's overlooked: Traditional IR playbooks may not emphasize the cloud's unique logging and monitoring capabilities.
Best practice: Leverage cloud-native logging and monitoring tools (like AWS CloudTrail, Azure Monitor, or Google Cloud Logging) to ensure real-time visibility and historical data access. Ensure that logs are centralized and accessible even if the cloud environment is compromised.
3. Integration with CI/CD Pipelines
What's overlooked: The dynamic nature of CI/CD pipelines is often not addressed in standard IR playbooks.
Best practice: Integrate incident response protocols with CI/CD pipelines to automatically halt deployments, initiate rollbacks, or quarantine affected code and services during an incident. This ensures that potential vulnerabilities aren't propagated during an ongoing response.
4. Automated Response and Remediation
What's overlooked: Organizations might rely too heavily on manual processes, which can slow down response times.
Best practice: Implement automation tools and scripts to execute predefined response actions (like isolating compromised resources, revoking credentials, or deploying security patches) quickly. Automation helps reduce human error and speeds up containment and remediation efforts.
5. Cross-Team Collaboration
What's overlooked: IR playbooks sometimes fail to clearly define collaboration between different teams, especially in cloud contexts.
Best practice: Establish clear communication protocols and collaboration frameworks that involve DevOps, security, compliance, and cloud engineering teams. Regular cross-team drills can help identify gaps and improve coordination during actual incidents.
6. Cloud Service Provider SLAs and Shared Responsibility Model
What's overlooked: The nuances of the shared responsibility model and service level agreements (SLAs) are often not fully considered.
Best practice: Clearly define the responsibilities between your organization and the cloud service provider. Ensure that your IR playbook includes steps to engage with the provider during an incident and understands what support or data access you can expect under the SLA.
7. Data Residency and Compliance Considerations
What's overlooked: Playbooks may overlook the importance of data residency laws and compliance requirements in cloud environments.
Best practice: Tailor your incident response playbook to ensure compliance with data residency laws and industry regulations. This includes detailing how to handle data breaches involving cloud-stored data, especially in multi-jurisdictional scenarios.
Wiz: Simplified IR playbooks with automation and integration
Wiz is an integrated cloud native application protection platform (CNAPP) that brings together multiple solutions to protect your organization from advanced threats.
Leveraging automated workflows and powerful analytics, Wiz streamlines your IR playbooks, building in automation and advanced analytics so your teams can move quickly through the phases of containment, eradication, and recovery, including:
Rapid detection and prioritization: With continuous monitoring and threat intelligence, you’ll detect threats earlier and prioritize incidents more efficiently.
Automated investigation and response: Wiz significantly reduces investigation time and minimizes incident impact with automated evidence collection, root cause analysis, and response actions.
Comprehensive visibility: Wiz gives you deep visibility into cloud environments so that there are no blind spots and you can contain incidents effectively.
Intelligent threat hunting: With the Wiz Security Graph, you can operate proactively, correlating disparate data sources and identifying potential attack paths.
Wiz takes a strategic approach to security while keeping you covered for routine incident response tasks, boosting your overall security posture and resilience. With a range of pre-built incident response playbook templates, you can tailor responses to a range of incident scenarios, bringing security into alignment with your specific needs and environments to
Isolate affected resources to prevent spread,
Gather evidence for digital forensics and postmortem analysis, and
Remediate vulnerabilities to prevent incident recurrence.
Wiz puts the most comprehensive cloud security platform at your fingertips. Get a demo now to see how simple it is to boost your entire security posture with Wiz.
Learn why security operations team rely on Wiz to help them proactively detect and respond to unfolding cloud threats.
