Incident Response Playbooks: Planning for Cyber Incidents
Incident Response Playbooks: Planning for Cyber Incidents An incident response playbook is a living document that describes roles, steps, and communication during a cyber incident. It helps teams move quickly from detection to containment and recovery while keeping evidence intact. The goal is consistency, not complexity, so new staff can follow familiar steps under pressure. A good playbook aligns with your policies, tech tools, and risk posture. What a playbook covers Purpose and scope: which incidents it applies to Roles and contacts: on-call responsibilities and escalation paths Incident classification and escalation thresholds Detection and triage steps: what to look for and how to classify Containment, eradication, and recovery actions Recovery validation: how to confirm systems are safe to return Evidence handling: logs, chain of custody, and data protection Communication plans: stakeholders inside the organization and customers Regulatory and legal considerations: notice requirements After-action review: lessons learned and improvements Building practical playbooks Start with your most valuable assets and map data flows. Create lightweight runbooks for the common incident types. Use clear language and checklists, not long narratives. Include a simple decision tree for escalation and decision points when tools or roles are unavailable. Keep playbooks versioned and stored in a shared, access-controlled repository. Train on them so responders know where to look and what to do when time is short. ...