🖊️Incident Response Plans

Your Incident Response (IR) Plan is the blueprint for how you’ll react when things go wrong. It outlines roles, responsibilities, communication channels, escalation paths, and authority levels. A good IR Plan isn’t shelfware — it’s reviewed, tested, and embedded into your operational muscle memory. Make sure you know where it lives and how to use it. 

📚Playbooks 

If the IR Plan is the strategy, playbooks are the tactics. These are step-by-step guides tailored to specific threats — ransomware, phishing, insider threats, and more. Playbooks keep your response consistent, reduce panic, and accelerate decision-making when time is critical. Keep them practical, concise, and up to date with real-world attacker behaviours. 

💪Tabletop Exercises

You don’t want your first incident response to be a real one. Tabletop exercises simulate scenarios and test your plan in a pressure-free environment. Bring the right people to the table — tech, legal, PR, execs — and walk through "what ifs". You’ll uncover gaps, improve communications, and build team confidence when it matters most. 

🔃Backups and Recovery Strategy

Backups are your last line of defence — if they’re done right. That means encrypted, versioned, offline (or immutable), and tested regularly. Your Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) should guide your backup frequency and design. Don’t just have backups — know how to restore them quickly and securely. 

🪵Logging & Monitoring

You can’t protect what you can’t see. Proper logging gives you the evidence to detect and respond. Make sure your critical systems are logging to a central location (preferably a SIEM), with sufficient retention. Focus on authentication logs, privileged activity, and network traffic. Noise is useless — tune it for signal. 

🤖Endpoint Detection & Response (EDR)

Your EDR tool is the eyes and ears on your endpoints. It helps detect malicious behaviour, isolate infected machines, and perform forensics. But it’s not magic — it needs tuning, maintenance, and people who know how to use it. If you’ve got it deployed, test it. If you don’t, prioritise it. 

📋Asset Management

You can’t defend a ghost. Know what you own — systems, software, endpoints, cloud resources. Keep an up-to-date asset inventory with ownership and make sure that it is clearly defined. This helps with prioritisation during incidents and speeds up scoping and containment efforts. Shadow IT is a risk — bring it into the light. 

🧑‍🏫Staff Training

Humans are both your weakest link and your strongest defence. Regular security awareness training is critical — especially around phishing, password hygiene, and how to report suspicious activity. For technical teams, go deeper with IR workshops, malware triage, and threat hunting. Make security part of your culture, not just compliance. 

🦸Third-Party CSIRTs 

You don’t need to go it alone. If you don’t have an internal Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) capability, establish a relationship with a trusted third-party CSIRT provider before an incident. Put them on retainer if possible. Know how to contact them, what their scope is, and how to bring them in fast when the clock is ticking. 

Published by Gordon, Senior Security Researcher on 15th April 2025.