Build an incident-response plan before the first urgent call

During a cybersecurity incident, uncertainty and time pressure can turn a technical problem into a larger business disruption. A usable incident-response plan tells people who can make decisions, how to communicate, what must be preserved, and when to involve qualified outside parties.

What the official source says

Source fact: NIST SP 800-61 Revision 3 integrates incident response throughout Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 risk-management activities. NIST says this approach can help organizations prepare, reduce the number and impact of incidents, and improve detection, response, and recovery. The publication supersedes Revision 2.

Build the activation sheet first

DSE recommendation: keep a short, protected copy of the information needed during the first hour. Make it accessible even if normal email, identity, file sharing, or phone systems are unavailable.

Primary and alternate incident leads, executive decision-maker, and note keeper.

Current contacts for IT, security providers, cyber insurer, legal counsel, communications, critical suppliers, and appropriate authorities.

Criteria for activating the plan and escalating a suspected event.

Approved out-of-band communications and a rule against discussing the incident in potentially compromised channels.

Authority for isolating systems, disabling accounts, interrupting services, preserving evidence, and beginning recovery.

Plan the decisions, not every possible attack

Document critical services and dependencies, logging sources, backups, system owners, data owners, and recovery priorities. Define how responders will record observations, times, commands, transfers, and decisions. Establish a safe method for collecting potential evidence while limiting access and preserving original material when practical.

DSE recommendation: separate confirmed facts, working hypotheses, and decisions in the incident log. State who verified each fact and when. This reduces the chance that an early assumption becomes an inaccurate customer, employee, regulator, insurer, or public statement.

Exercise and maintain the plan

Run a tabletop exercise that requires actual decision-makers to work through a plausible scenario. Test unavailable contacts, compromised email, vendor escalation, business shutdown authority, restoration priorities, and external communications. Record gaps and assign remediation owners. Repeat after material changes in systems, suppliers, leadership, insurance, or legal obligations.

Important limits

This guide is operational education, not legal advice or a breach-notification determination. Notification, evidence, employment, privacy, insurance, and law-enforcement decisions require the organization’s qualified advisers. DSE support should not be represented as digital forensics, breach counsel, crisis communications, or an incident-response retainer unless those services are expressly contracted.

Practical next step: schedule a 60-minute tabletop around a lost administrator account or encrypted file server. Require the team to locate contacts and make decisions using the current plan, then correct the highest-impact gap.