Incident Response Plan Policy 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 policy establishes the technical framework for identifying, containing, eradicating, and recovering from cybersecurity or infrastructure incidents. The objective is to minimize operational downtime, ensure data integrity, and maintain compliance through a standardized, repeatable response lifecycle.

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3. Scope & Prerequisites

• Scope: Applies to all production environments, cloud infrastructure, and internal registry databases managed by Template Registry.
• Required Tools:
  • Secure Communication Channel (Out-of-band: Signal/Slack Private).
  • SIEM Access (Splunk/Datadog).
  • Root Access Credentials (Vault-managed).
  • Incident Logging Framework (Jira/ServiceNow).

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4. Roles & Responsibilities (RACI Matrix)

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5. Step-by-Step Procedure

Phase 1: Detection & Analysis

• Verify alert trigger via SIEM/Log aggregator.
• Correlate logs to establish incident timeline.
• Determine incident severity (SEV1: Critical/Down; SEV2: Impaired; SEV3: Minor).
• Initiate out-of-band communication channel.

Phase 2: Containment

• Isolate affected network segments or microservices.
• Implement temporary firewall/ACL rules to block ingress/egress to malicious IPs.
• Capture volatile memory (RAM) and disk snapshots for forensic analysis.
• Disable compromised service account credentials.

Phase 3: Eradication

• Identify root cause (vulnerability, misconfiguration, or external threat).
• Rebuild systems from hardened "known-good" golden images.
• Deploy patches to mitigate exploited vulnerabilities.
• Rotate all API keys and secrets associated with the affected scope.

Phase 4: Recovery

• Verify system integrity via automated test suites.
• Restore data from offline/immutable backups if integrity was compromised.
• Gradually shift production traffic back to restored nodes.
• Monitor performance metrics for anomalies post-restoration.

Phase 5: Post-Incident Activity

• Conduct "Blameless Post-Mortem" meeting within 72 hours.
• Document lessons learned and update IRP documentation.
• File formal incident report for compliance audits.

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6. Quality Assurance & Pro-Tips

• Best Practice: Never perform troubleshooting on the production primary—always work on a cloned forensic instance if possible to preserve state.
• Common Pitfall: Failing to rotate credentials after a breach. If a box is popped, the secrets it held are compromised by default.
• Metric Thresholds:
  • MTTD (Mean Time to Detect): < 15 minutes.
  • MTTR (Mean Time to Recover): < 4 hours (SEV1).

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7. Frequently Asked Questions

Q: At what point do we notify external stakeholders or legal? A: If PII (Personally Identifiable Information) or financial data has been accessed, notify Legal immediately—before any further internal investigation.

Q: Can we skip containment to avoid downtime? A: No. Prioritize data integrity over uptime. An active, uncontrolled breach poses a greater long-term risk than a planned, short-term service outage.

Q: Who serves as the ultimate authority during a SEV1 incident? A: The Incident Commander (IC). The IC’s directive overrides standard operational workflows until the incident is marked as contained.