Building an Effective Incident Response Playbook

Effective incident response requires preparation before incidents occur. Playbooks provide standardised procedures that enable security teams to respond quickly and consistently, reducing the impact of security incidents.

Playbooks should cover common incident types including malware infections, phishing attacks, data breaches, and denial of service attacks. Each playbook should define detection criteria, initial response steps, escalation procedures, containment actions, and recovery steps.

Regular testing through tabletop exercises and simulated incidents ensures playbooks remain effective and team members are familiar with their roles. Playbooks should be living documents, updated based on lessons learned from real incidents and changes to the threat landscape.