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TechKnowSurge Catalog Videos Incident Response (IR)
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Incident Response (IR)

Incident response covers the strategies, processes, and plans organizations use to detect, contain, and recover from IT and security incidents while minimizing impact on users and services. It also includes digital forensics fundamentals for situations requiring evidence collection and criminal investigation.

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About this video

When infrastructure or systems experience problems, the speed and quality of the response directly affects user trust and service reputation. Incident response provides a structured approach to detecting, managing, and resolving those problems as efficiently as possible, with the core goal of reducing the scope and impact of any given incident. Understanding the typical timeline of an incident — from early warning signs through escalation and eventual resolution — is fundamental to building a response capability that can act before users are affected. A formal incident response plan documents the procedures an organization will follow at every stage: preparation before an incident occurs, detection and analysis during one, and containment, eradication, and recovery to restore normal operations. Equally important is stakeholder communication, which keeps affected parties informed and maintains confidence even when things go wrong. Plans must be tested and validated regularly, and the teams responsible for carrying them out must be trained on the specific procedures they will execute under pressure. After an incident is resolved, root cause analysis identifies the underlying conditions that allowed it to occur, enabling corrective action to prevent recurrence. In cases involving potential criminal activity or legal proceedings, digital forensics comes into play — a discipline focused on the proper collection, preservation, and analysis of evidence from digital systems. Handling digital evidence requires strict adherence to established procedures to ensure its integrity and admissibility, making familiarity with forensic principles an essential part of a well-rounded incident response skill set.

What you'll learn

What's covered

Incident Response

Aligned to

CompTIA CySA+
3.3 Explain the preparation and post-incident activity phases of the incident management life cycle.
4.2 Explain the importance of incident response reporting and communication.
CompTIA Security+
4.8 Explain appropriate incident response activities.
ISC2 CISSP
7.6 Conduct incident management
7.1 Understand and comply with investigations
NIST CSF
RS.MA-01 The incident response plan is executed in coordination with relevant third parties once an incident is declared.
RS.AN-03 Analysis is performed to establish what has taken place during an incident and the root cause of the incident.
CompTIA SecurityX
4.4 Explain incident response and recovery procedures.

Key terms

Incident Response
IR
A structured process for identifying, containing, eradicating, and recovering from security incidents.
Containment
The phase of incident response focused on limiting the spread and impact of a security incident to prevent further damage.
Eradication
The phase of incident response in which the root cause and components of an incident, such as malware, are completely removed from affected systems.
Recovery
The phase of incident response in which affected systems and services are restored to normal operation after an incident.
Root Cause Analysis
RCA
A systematic investigation process that identifies the underlying cause of a security incident or system failure, going beyond symptoms to prevent recurrence. RCA findings drive corrective actions and improvements to security controls.
Digital Forensics
Digital Forensics is the science of collecting, preserving, analyzing, and presenting electronic evidence in a legally sound manner to support incident investigations or criminal proceedings.
Lessons Learned
A post-incident review process that documents findings and identifies improvements to prevent future incidents and strengthen response procedures.

Topics

Incident Response Digital Forensics Root Cause Analysis Threat Containment Cybersecurity Evidence Collection

Transcript

Why Incident Response Matters

If our infrastructure or systems have some sort of issue, how we respond to that issue may make a huge difference on how our users view our services, or view us. And so we really want to make sure that we know how to respond to an incident and do it in a proper way.

The Timeline of an Incident

One thing we're going to take a look at is the timeline of an incident and what that looks like, because a lot of times we start seeing some sort of signs of malfunction early on.

Let's say we're dealing with some sort of system that has lots of different users on it, and maybe that system is getting saturated, too many users on it, or maybe we have some code issues that are causing some problems, or some other issue. A lot of times we'll see some sort of signs of malfunction earlier on, and what's happening is they get worse and worse.

At some point in time, hopefully we're getting alerted before users alert us, and we can start responding to the incident and maybe perhaps even resolve the incident before anyone actually realizes that there are some malfunctions, some issues that are occurring. If not, the system may go offline and eventually we're going to affect our customers and our users, and they're going to start reporting that there's an issue.

The Goal of Incident Response

The goal of incident response is really to reduce the amount of scope and impact any incident has on us. We can reduce the scope and impact by being able to respond as quick as we can once we start receiving reports, or once we claim that there's an incident, and then be able to respond very quickly and in an organized fashion.

Also, being able to communicate well to whoever our stakeholders are. By doing this, we're going to keep them informed, and they're going to be happier and more understanding when things go awry. Plus, we're also going to be able to resolve issues much quicker and much faster.

The Incident Response Plan

This is where we create an incident response plan - that way we are going to approach incident response. We detail out a lot of different aspects of how we treat incidents, from prepping ahead of time, to how we're going to actually respond, the steps that we're going to respond to, who we need to communicate. It gives us all sorts of details on how we're going to respond to incidents.

The Process

Here's a little bit about the process of incident response. There's quite a few things that we can do ahead of time that's going to prepare us for success, and so we're going to want to make sure we do that.

Then during an incident, we're going to want to, number one, detect that there's an incident. Do some analysis on that, and analyze who is going to be the best person to come in and fix this. We're going to have to do some containment, eradication and recovery of this. This is going to contain a certain incident. If, for instance, there's some sort of malware or something, we're going to have to eradicate it, and then there are steps that are going to happen for recovery afterwards. And then there's some follow-up that needs to happen, like we're going to do some lessons learned.

So we're going to make sure that we can do each one of these steps well to be successful in incident response.

Testing the Plan

Not only are we going to want to come up with the processes that we're going to follow during incident responses, but we're going to want to test our plan out to make sure that it is valid and that we respond, that these procedures do exactly what it is that we're trying to do. There are several different ways that we could test out our incident response plan.

One thing that can help us dial in our incident response plan, and also make sure that we can carry it out correctly, is through training and practice - making sure that our IT support systems and those who are managing our infrastructure can respond well. In order for them to be able to do that, they need to understand what the incident response plan is and how to carry out those procedures.

Root Cause Analysis

When something does happen, we want to make sure that it doesn't continue to happen. We're going to do some sort of root cause analysis, where we analyze what is the root cause of whatever the incident was, so that way we can take some corrective action to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Digital Forensics

There are also times when we're collecting evidence. For instance, maybe there's some sort of legal litigation, or perhaps there's some sort of crime that's been committed, that we need to carry out forensics on our digital assets. So that's where we get into digital forensics: when we carry out and analyze digital systems for some sort of criminal investigation.

Now when it comes to digital forensics, there are certain ways, appropriate ways, that we would carry this out, and we need to be very careful with this evidence. So there are a few things that we would want to know when it comes to digital forensics, and we would not want to know some of those procedures and those ideas ahead of time.

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