A harsh reality of enterprise cybersecurity is that even the most diligent, careful organizations will eventually experience a threat incident. That’s why an important part of a robust cybersecurity strategy is not just preventing attacks but knowing how best to respond to an active one.
But incident response (IR) is more complex than just dialing a phone number, asking a third party for help during an incident, and letting them take the reins. While the act of incident response — meaning the processes and tools used to identify, contain, and remediate a cyber incident — happens in the moment, strong incident response follows a lifecycle, one that relies on proactive components that must be planned out and implemented well before an incident ever occurs.
Within this “preparedness” stage of the IR lifecycle lies planning and readiness, two critical components to proactive incident response that can help position an organization to respond effectively to fight back against a threat actor during an incident.
What is IR Planning?
IR planning is the process of developing a comprehensive IR plan, which acts as a pre-established, scenario-specific protocol that guides how internal teams and external partners respond to an incident in order to act swiftly and cohesively under pressure.
Whether dealing with ransomware, business email compromise (BEC), or other cyber threats, IR planning is vital to a strong IR process, as it can shorten response and remediation time, help identify and prepare key stakeholders, streamline when and how to initiate complex processes like digital forensics, and support business continuity and executive management.
While IR plans should be tailored to each organization’s security maturity, risk tolerance, and environment, there are standard, core components that all effective IR plans will include.
Formal Policy and Governance
A well-defined IR policy establishes when and how to trigger incident response. It specifies what qualifies as an incident and defines incident types, scope, escalation criteria, and the authority chain for decision-making. This governance layer prevents ambiguity and the loss of precious minutes during critical events while ensuring consistent execution and improving the speed of remediation.
Defined Roles and Responsibilities
Successful response hinges on assigning clear responsibilities to all incident response stakeholders across the organization:
- Security teams should handle detection, triage, containment, and remediation, often with the support of a third-party incident response provider
- Legal and compliance should oversee regulatory notifications, support adherence to privacy law, and take responsibility for evidence integrity and documentation
- The C-Suite should determine strategic priorities, make key decisions and oversee business continuity measures; non-executive members of the board of directors may be directly involved if their purview includes cybersecurity matters
- Public relations and communications should handle both internal messaging and external disclosures
Third-party stakeholders like IR teams, law enforcement, and cyber insurance representatives should also be identified and integrated into your IR plan.
Communication Framework
A robust plan must define communication channels and templates for internal leadership, regulators, law enforcement, partners, customers, and insurers. Rapid, accurate messaging helps protect reputation while helping to meet regulatory and contractual obligations.
Scenario-Specific Playbooks
These are tactical guides for common incident types. They operationalize your policies into specific, actionable steps for well-defined threats. Here are a few examples of topics these playbooks may include, based on the attack type:
- Ransomware: Segment networks, image impacted systems, collect artifacts, and initiate decryption or backup restoration workflows. Some organizations may also include guidelines for communicating and/or negotiating with the attacker.
- Business email compromise (BEC): Triage affected users, devices and other assets, revoke access, inspect mailbox rules, hold financial transactions, and initiate domain takedown requests.
- Insider threat: Review access logs, coordinate with HR, and preserve system audit trails.
No matter the attack type, playbooks should be updated with current threat intelligence to reflect ever-evolving adversary tactics.
Sample Ransomware Playbook Workflow
The following sample playbook outlines the objective and the steps involved in an IR scenario. Note that certain steps, such as communication, may occur earlier, later, or multiple times during the process, and that at each point key discoveries and outcomes should be reported back to the IR lead and key stakeholders.
Objective: Contain, remediate, and recover from a ransomware attack while preserving forensic evidence, meeting regulatory obligations, and minimizing operational downtime.
1. Detection and Triage
- Collect and validate evidence to confirm incident
- Identify impacted assets, and affected business processes and customers
- Scope the potential impact to the business using pre-defined metrics
2. Containment
- Isolate infected systems
- Block malicious IPs, domains, and hashes in firewalls and endpoints
- Suspend compromised accounts and update credentials
3. Forensics
- Capture disk images of affected systems before restoration
- Preserve relevant log data
- Document timestamps, IOCs, and actions taken
4. Remediation
- Remove malicious executables, scripts, and persistence mechanisms
- Apply security patches
- Threat hunt for residual IOCs across your infrastructure
5. Restoration
- Restore data from verified backups
- Conduct staged system reintroduction
- Perform user acceptance testing to validate functionality
6. Communications and Reporting
- Provide internal updates to stakeholders according to the IR timeline
- Notify regulators, customers, partners, and insurers according to the IR plan
- Coordinate with law enforcement where appropriate
By establishing a comprehensive IR plan, your organization puts itself in a better position to defend against both known and unknown threats, while facilitating proper communication with all affected and interested parties, and assuring executives that you’ve taken the necessary steps to minimize cyber risk and potential damage to the business.
What Are the Benefits of IR Planning?
A comprehensive, well-defined IR plan can deliver measurable advantages that extend across technical, operational, financial, and compliance elements of an organization. When aligned to cybersecurity frameworks like NIST, an IR plan can transform incident response from one of high stress and even higher stakes, to a structured, repeatable discipline that can shave time off your response and potentially save you from major losses.
Here are a few of the major benefits of an IR plan:
Faster Detection, Containment, and Remediation
A well-defined IR plan can help accelerates mean time to respond (MTTR), reducing attack dwell time and the potential scope of damage. Incident-specific playbooks and actionable containment protocols like device isolation and account lockdowns can be executed swiftly with certainty, helping ensure prompt incident containment and root-cause identification and eradication.
Enhanced Forensic Readiness and Legal Assurance
An IR plan can help promote evidence integrity from the moment an incident is detected. Detailed procedures for disk imaging, memory capture, log retainment and consolidation, and chain-of-custody documentation help digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) teams conduct accurate investigations of an incident while retaining essential information and evidence.
Cost Savings
There are many associated organizational costs of an incident beyond direct losses or ransom payments. This includes business loss due to reputational damage, lost revenue due to work stoppage or downtime, regulatory fines, potential legal fees stemming from lawsuits, intellectual property theft and a potential rise in cyber insurance premiums. With a comprehensive IR plan, detection, containment, and eradication can all happen faster, at a moment where every minute is critical and comes with steep financial repercussions.
What is Incident Readiness?
Incident readiness is the measurable state of preparedness in which an organization has the capabilities, resources, and processes in place to identify, respond to, and recover from a cybersecurity incident with minimal delay or disruption. In other words, while an IR plan describes what to do, incident readiness ensures your team knows how to execute the IR plan, and has the ability to do so.
Incident readiness, first and foremost, means being able to respond quickly whenever an incident occurs, and incidents don’t always happen during business hours. For that reason, many believe sound incident readiness requires fully functional 24×7 monitoring and detection solutions, such as managed detection and response (MDR) and endpoint detection and response (EDR). These solutions are constantly monitoring key IT estate regions for malicious or anomalous activity, and alerting SOC analysts — your own, or from a third-party provider — as soon as they are detected. Incident readiness also requires access to current threat intelligence, sufficient log visibility and retention, and access to IR services as needed.
Operationally, incident readiness requires a well-staffed, highly trained team of security experts (either residing in-house or via a partnership with a third party), as well as designated incident response stakeholders across the organization with clearly defined roles and responsibilities, plus access to secure communication channels.
However, incident readiness isn’t simply a function of reactive cybersecurity. It has proactive elements, as well, including participation in regular tabletop exercises – group sessions in which IR stakeholders practice undergoing specific scenarios – designed to uncover gaps in processes, insufficient or incomplete technology integration, and poor interdepartmental coordination and communication in a simulated attack environment.
There’s also a regulatory component to incident readiness. Organizations need to ensure they are in compliance with the relevant frameworks related to their industry and region prior to an attack and know the steps and deadlines for reporting both during and after an incident.
Tools and Solutions
- MDR
- EDR
- Log Sources
- Threat Intelligence
- Incident Response
Operations
- Identified chain of command
- Defined roles and responsibilities
- Trained security team
- Secure communication channels
Preparation
- Tabletop exercises
- Readiness runbooks
Compliance
- Adherence to regulation frameworks
- Policy for post-incident notifications
When all these elements are combined, incident readiness transforms a written IR plan into an executable series of processes that are built and tested to withstand the stresses of a real-world incident.
DFIR Retainers and Incident Readiness
Digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) retainer services are another component of incident readiness organizations can employ. Deployed and managed by third parties, these services are a strong option for organizations that may be smaller, have less in-house expertise, or are less security mature. They are also often called in for an especially large, damaging, or high-profile incident.
DFIR retainer services are becoming a requirement to obtain many cyber insurance policies, with research firm Gartner stating that, “Cyber insurance policies typically require organizations to have a DFIR retainer to ensure a minimum level of readiness and to minimize potential loss.”
It’s important to note that while DFIR retainers can assist with planning and readiness, the retainer component is critical for in-the-moment incident response.
While DFIR retainer services vary by vendor, there are a few consistent requirements, as defined by Gartner. These include:
- Pre-incident design and assessment
- Post-incident response assistance
- Pre-paid retainers
Discover why Arctic Wolf’s Incident360 Retainer has industry analysts wondering “Why didn’t anyone think of this before?”
Enhancing Your IR Planning and Incident Readiness with Arctic Wolf
As the market leader in managed security operations, Arctic Wolf is dedicated to ensuring your organization has support before, during, and after an incident.
Before
Arctic Wolf® Managed Detection and Response (MDR) provides 24×7 monitoring of your networks, endpoints, and cloud environments to detect, respond to, and remediate cyber attacks.
Aurora™ Endpoint Security delivers market-leading AI-driven prevention, detection, and response, stopping threats before they disrupt your business. Designed to be easy to use and highly effective, whether on its own or with 24×7 monitoring, if offers flexible deployment options so you can strengthen your defenses and protect your organization from costly breaches.
Arctic Wolf® Managed Risk empowers you to discover, assess, and harden your environment against digital risks by contextualizing the attack surface coverage across your networks, endpoints, and cloud environments.
Arctic Wolf® Cyber JumpStart is a complimentary suite of tools designed to help you manage your cyber risk, map your security posture against industry-standard frameworks, and unlock insights into understanding cyber insurance qualifying requirements. Perfect for organizations just starting their IR planning process, the portal includes a built-in IR planner template organizations can fill out and securely store (both within Arctic Wolf and offline), guides to help your organization harden your security posture (including common cyber controls and how different Arctic Wolf solutions can reduce your risk profile), and a cyber resilience assessment, which is aligned to NIST CF 2.0 and CIS Security Controls, to help your organization identify and harden specific security gaps.
And Arctic Wolf Managed Security Awareness® ends human risk by delivering 100% relevant microlearning content that your employees will actually pay attention to.
During
Arctic Wolf® Incident Response provides the full suite of services you need to recover from a cyber attack and get back to business as fast as possible. Our experienced IR team will remove the threat actor from your environment, negotiate with threat actors, determine the root cause and extent of the attack, and restore critical systems to a pre-incident state.
The one-of-a-kind Arctic Wolf Incident360 Retainer includes full IR coverage for one incident and provides customers with prioritized access to insurance-approved IR experts that will remove the threat actor’s access to the environment, determine the root cause and extent of the attack, and restore business systems and apps to normal. It also includes a full-suite of incident readiness activities – including IR planning and a tabletop exercise – to prepare an organization ahead of a cyber incident. This proactive planning helps customers respond faster and emerge stronger from incidents.
After
No cybersecurity solution can prevent 100% of cyber attacks. The Arctic Wolf Security Operations Warranty helps transfer any remaining organizational risk — with a monetary benefit of up to $3 million (USD) — and provides support for the recovery and repair of an environment after a cyber attack.
All of these tools and solutions are managed by our Security Teams and utilize insights from the AI-powered Aurora® Platform, which ingests nine trillion events per week, and enriches them with threat intelligence and risk context to drive faster threat detection, simplify incident response, and eliminate alert fatigue. Taken as a whole, organizations who partner with Arctic Wolf are uniquely positioned to address cyber risk end-to-end through a single partner with the platform and security expertise to mitigate risks and strengthen your security posture over time.
DISCLAIMER: The contents of this blog post are for educational purposes only and Arctic Wolf is not endorsing any insurance provider, product or service. Arctic Wolf and its employees are not licensed producers and therefore are not engaging in the sale, solicitation or negotiation of insurance and are NOT offering advice regarding insurance terms, conditions, premium rates or claims. Customers interested in purchasing cyber insurance coverage should consult with an appropriately licensed insurance broker.
