Asd Incident Response Plan Template

Standard Operating Procedure: Incident Response Plan (IRP)

Template Registry Engineering Standards

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1. Document Control Block

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2. Executive Summary & Purpose

This document establishes the standardized framework for detecting, analyzing, containing, and recovering from information security incidents. The objective is to minimize operational downtime, mitigate data exfiltration risks, and ensure regulatory compliance through a repeatable, evidence-based workflow.

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3. Scope & Prerequisites

• Scope: Applies to all Template Registry production environments, cloud infrastructure, and personnel-managed assets.
• Prerequisites:
  • Access to the centralized logging cluster (e.g., ELK/Splunk).
  • Active credentials for the Incident Response (IR) Slack/PagerDuty channel.
  • Pre-provisioned forensic workstation (if physical) or hardened VDI instance.
  • PPE/Hardware: Mandatory secondary out-of-band communication device (Mobile/Satellite).

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4. Roles & Responsibilities (RACI Matrix)

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5. Step-by-Step Procedure

Phase 1: Identification & Triage

• Verify indicator of compromise (IOC) via telemetry/logs.
• Determine incident severity (Critical, High, Medium, Low).
• Open formal incident ticket in ITSM platform.
• Establish communication bridge (Dedicated Slack channel/Zoom).

Phase 2: Containment

• Isolate compromised hosts (Network segmentation/VPC isolation).
• Revoke compromised credentials/API keys.
• Snapshot memory and disk states for forensic analysis.
• Implement short-term traffic filtering (WAF/ACL updates).

Phase 3: Eradication

• Identify root cause (e.g., vulnerability, misconfiguration, social engineering).
• Purge malware artifacts/backdoors.
• Patch software/firmware vulnerabilities.
• Rebuild systems from verified, clean golden images.

Phase 4: Recovery

• Restore data from integrity-verified offline backups.
• Monitor system telemetry for anomalies post-restoration.
• Scale production services back to full capacity.

Phase 5: Lessons Learned (Post-Mortem)

• Conduct formal review within 72 hours of resolution.
• Document deviations from this SOP.
• Update detection logic and preventative controls based on findings.

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6. Quality Assurance & Pro-Tips

• The Golden Rule: Never conduct incident response actions on the primary production database unless it is the only way to halt exfiltration.
• Pro-Tip: Always maintain a "Chain of Custody" log for forensic snapshots. If it isn't documented, it didn't happen.
• Metric Thresholds:
  • Mean Time to Acknowledge (MTTA): < 15 minutes.
  • Mean Time to Contain (MTTC): < 2 hours for critical assets.

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7. Frequently Asked Questions

Q: Should I reboot a compromised server immediately? A: Absolutely not. Rebooting destroys volatile memory (RAM) which often contains encryption keys, malicious process artifacts, and network connections. Snapshot the memory first.

Q: Who is authorized to declare a "Critical" incident? A: Any member of the Engineering or Security team can trigger a "P0/Critical" alert. The Incident Commander (IC) will then assume control, but the immediate response protocol must be initiated by the discoverer.

Q: How do we handle forensic data privacy? A: All forensic artifacts must be encrypted at rest and stored in a restricted-access bucket with IAM logs enabled. Access is limited to the Incident Commander and assigned security forensic analysts.