When a cyberattack hits, every second counts. Whether it’s ransomware locking up systems or a data breach exposing sensitive information, how you respond can mean the difference between a quick recovery and lasting damage. That’s where incident response comes in: a structured, expert-led process that helps businesses detect, contain, and recover from security incidents at the necessary speed.
Incident response teams are built to quickly identify, contain, and resolve security incidents, ensuring smooth operations and reducing losses. In this article, you learn what an incident response service involves, its key components, and how it protects.
Incident response is a component of cybersecurity that enables organisations to detect, respond to, and recover from security incidents in a timely manner. It is a set of procedures and processes that help minimise the impact of a security breach, maintain trust, and ensure regulatory compliance.
IR helps organisations to quickly identify and contain an incident, minimise the damage, and restore operations. A well-planned incident response plan helps reduce the risk of financial loss, reputational damage, and legal liability.
An incident response plan (IRP) demonstrates commitment to security. It helps maintain trust with customers, partners, and stakeholders, and ensures that the organisation’s reputation is protected.
Many regulatory bodies require that organisations have an incident response plan in place. While GDPR does not explicitly say “you must have an incident response plan”, it requires organisations to detect, assess, and report data breaches within 72 hours (Articles 33 and 34). GDPR also requires organisations to implement “appropriate technical and organisational measures” (Article 32), which includes readiness for incidents.
PCI DSS is more direct. Requirement 12.10 explicitly states that organisations must implement an incident response plan for cardholder data breaches. It includes clear expectations on testing, roles and responsibilities, reporting, and containment.
In Germany, for critical infrastructure operators, incident handling is mandatory under BSIG (BSI-Gesetz). The BSI-Gesetz requires implementation of an incident response strategy and ongoing testing.
The NIS2 Directive (EU, effective 2024/2025) requires incident handling capabilities for “essential” and “important” entities. While it doesn't use the term IRP uniformly, it mandates processes for detection, reporting, and response to security incidents.
Finally, the international standards ISO/IEC 27001 & 27035, and in particular ISO/IEC 27001:2013/2022 (Annex A) and ISO 27035 (specifically for incident management), define clear requirements for establishing, operating, and maintaining an incident response process. These are often used as a benchmark for regulatory audits and supplier security assessments.
A high-quality incident response (IR) service provides a structured, proactive approach to detecting, containing, and recovering from cybersecurity incidents. Whether delivered as part of a managed service (like MDR) or on-demand, a strong IR service typically includes the following key components:
Goal: Ensure the organisation is ready to act decisively and knows what to do before an incident occurs.
Goal: Quickly identify real threats and prioritise them for investigation.
Goal: Understand what happened, how it happened, and what systems or data were affected.
Goal: Stop the attacker, prevent further damage, and remove their access.
Goal: Bring business operations back online safely and confidently.
Goal: Improve long-term security posture and meet reporting obligations.
Preparation is the cornerstone of an IRP, involving assessing vulnerabilities and creating an action plan for potential cybersecurity threats. This proactive approach ensures that when an incident occurs, the organisation is ready.
Often based on NIST 800-61 or ISO/IEC 27035, this section covers:
Monitoring and detection capabilities are critical to reducing the average time it takes to identify a breach, often measured in months, with industry reports citing an average of 194 days. Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) systems play a central role by aggregating and analysing data from diverse sources across the network, providing a comprehensive overview of security events.
The integration of SIEM with Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) tools significantly enhances security posture. While SIEM offers network-wide visibility, EDR focuses on continuous monitoring of endpoints, such as laptops, servers, and mobile devices, to detect and respond to threats at the device level. EDR solutions leverage behavioral analysis techniques to identify abnormal or suspicious activities in real-time, which often serve as early indicators of potential security incidents.
Automation within EDR solutions enables immediate action, such as isolating compromised devices to prevent further spread of malware or unauthorized access. Expanding this approach, Managed Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions unify multiple detection sources, including endpoints, networks, cloud environments, and applications, to improve threat correlation and accelerate incident detection.
Once a security incident is identified and analysed, the next priority is to contain the threat and eradicate it from the environment. These phases are critical to stopping attacker activity, limiting damage, and preparing for safe recovery.
Containment focuses on isolating the threat to prevent it from spreading or causing further harm. Typical containment strategies include:
Containment measures can be short-term (quick actions to halt active threats) or long-term (more permanent changes to prevent recurrence).
Eradication involves removing the root cause of the incident, cleaning up malicious artifacts, and eliminating any attacker persistence. Common eradication strategies are:
Both containment and eradication require coordination, clear roles and responsibilities, and documentation. These steps are often guided by predefined playbooks for specific attack types, such as ransomware or business email compromise.
When executed effectively, containment and eradication set the foundation for successful recovery and reduce the risk of reinfection or follow-up attacks.
After a cyber incident has been contained and eradicated, the focus shifts to recovery and restoration, i.e. the crucial phase where affected systems are brought back online and operations return to normal. Recovery a structured process aimed at rebuilding trust, verifying system integrity, and ensuring long-term resilience.
One of the first steps in recovery is restoring affected systems using backups that are verified to be clean and uncompromised. This ensures that the organisation isn’t reintroducing malware or malicious configurations during the recovery process.
If the incident exploited a specific weakness, such as an unpatched vulnerability or misconfiguration, it must be resolved before restoring normal operations. This helps prevent the same attack vector from being used again.
Before reintroducing systems into the production environment, they must be thoroughly tested. This includes scanning for malware, checking configuration baselines, and confirming that security controls (like logging and access controls) are intact.
If attacker activity involved stolen credentials or account misuse, affected passwords must be reset. In high-risk cases, this may include rotating API keys, SSH keys, or even conducting full Active Directory hygiene.
Just because the visible signs of compromise are gone does not mean the threat is fully neutralised. Organisations should implement heightened monitoring during and after the recovery phase to detect any signs of persistence or re-entry attempts. This is often referred to as “watch mode.”
Clear communication with stakeholders, including IT, legal, leadership, and in some cases customers or regulators, is essential during recovery. It ensures alignment on timelines, risks, and mitigation progress.
The recovery phase should also include a review of how well business continuity plans performed. What went well? What gaps were identified? These insights should feed into an after-action review and lead to updates in the incident response plan, processes, and technology stack.
The final, yet arguably most valuable, stage of any incident response process is the post-incident review. Once the dust has settled, it's time to step back, assess what happened, and turn the experience into actionable insights. This review is critical for improving future response capabilities, strengthening defences, and building long-term cyber resilience.
The incident response team works with logs, forensic data, and internal reports to build a clear, chronological timeline of the attack. This includes:
The timeline helps identify what was missed, what was detected too late, and where improvements can be made.
Understanding how the incident happened is essential. Was it due to a phishing email, an unpatched system, misconfigured access rights, or something else?
The review evaluates how well your organisation responded:
This is a chance to identify any bottlenecks or breakdowns in process.
The post-incident phase should result in concrete recommendations, such as:
These insights should feed directly into your broader security roadmap.
Non-technical stakeholders (e.g. executives, legal, comms) should receive a clear, non-technical summary of the incident: what happened, how it was handled, and what will be done to prevent recurrence. Transparency builds trust and shows control.
If any part of the incident response plan, runbooks, or escalation matrix failed or fell short, it should be updated immediately. This might also include adjusting severity classifications or refining containment protocols.
Depending on the scope and impact of the incident, you may need to provide final reports to regulators, insurers, or customers. The post-incident review helps ensure those reports are accurate, consistent, and complete.
A well-designed incident response service includes preparation, detection, investigation, containment, recovery, and post-incident review. Each phase plays a vital role in minimising damage, maintaining business continuity, and fulfilling legal and regulatory obligations.
The article explored:
An incident response service prepares organisations to effectively handle security incidents by enabling swift action to mitigate threats and facilitate recovery. This proactive approach minimises damage and enhances overall security posture.
An effective incident response plan must encompass early detection, containment and eradication strategies, post-incident analysis, and continuous improvement. These components are essential to ensure a swift and successful response to incidents.
Different industries tailor their incident response strategies to meet specific challenges and comply with regulatory requirements, ensuring effective management of incidents. For example, healthcare emphasises patient data privacy, while logistics focuses on supply chain disruptions.
Continuous monitoring is essential for early threat detection and rapid response to incidents, which helps maintain robust protection against evolving cyber threats. This proactive approach significantly mitigates potential damages from breaches.
Partnering with Managed Service Providers enhances incident response by offering access to experienced professionals, advanced cybersecurity solutions, and continuous monitoring and response services. This not only strengthens incident response capabilities but also improves overall security posture.