Responding to a security incident is a multi-stage process. The primary steps that should be included in an incident response strategy include: Monitoring and Detection: This stage of the incident response process is continually ongoing. Security team members monitor the organization’s network and system for any potential signs of malicious activity. If a potential incident is detected, then incident response begins. Quarantine Affected Devices: Cyberattackers rarely remain on the device that they initially compromise in an attack. Quarantining any devices that have been affected and potentially compromised as part of a security incident can help to stop malware from spreading or the attacker from expanding their foothold to other systems in the organization’s network. Assess Severity and Damage: Once affected systems have been quarantined, the incident response team has time to perform an in-depth investigation of the incident. This includes determining the purpose of the attack, what actions the attacker performed, and the severity or damage caused. Remediation and Recovery: With a better understanding of the security incident, the incident response team can start cleaning up affected devices and restoring them to normal operations. This may include removing malware from the impacted devices or even wiping them and restoring from a clean backup. Once the devices are secure again, they can be released from quarantine to normal operations. Notify Affected Parties: Reporting is a crucial component of incident response activities. Whether to management, customers, or regulators, these notifications should be made as soon as it is possible to do so. Prepare for the Future: The fact that a security incident occurred means that an organization has a hole in its cyber defenses. After the incident is completed, the incident response team and all stakeholders should perform a retrospective to understand what went wrong and to identify steps that can be taken to prevent similar incidents from occurring in the future. Developing plans for common scenarios for each of these core stages is a good start toward an incident response strategy. By building a framework that is widely applicable, an incident response team solves many of the challenges associated with effective incident response. From there, the incident response team can fill in the gaps by developing specific playbooks with more in-depth policies and procedures for dealing with common scenarios.