Template for Incident Response Plan

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE: INCIDENT RESPONSE PLAN (IRP)

Document ID: SOP-SEC-042
Effective Date: October 24, 2023
Version: 3.2.0
Review Cadence: Semi-Annual
Author: Julian Vance, Chief Architect, Template Registry

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1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY & PURPOSE

This Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) defines the institutional-grade framework for identifying, containing, eradicating, and recovering from high-severity security incidents within the Template Registry infrastructure. The primary objective is to minimize dwell time, maintain evidentiary chain-of-custody, ensure systemic integrity, and restore baseline operations with zero data loss or structural corruption.

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2. SCOPE & PREREQUISITES

Scope

This procedure applies to all production environments, staging clusters, identity providers, artifact registries, and auxiliary cloud infrastructure owned, operated, or managed by Template Registry.

Prerequisites & Access Control

• Authentication: Hardware-token MFA (FIDO2/WebAuthn) with privileged access management (PAM) elevation.
• Tooling:
  • SIEM / Log Aggregation (Datadog / Splunk Enterprise)
  • Container Forensics Toolkit (Sysdig, Falco, Rekall)
  • Incident Collaboration Suite (PagerDuty, dedicated Slack bridge SEC-INC-[ID])
  • Out-of-band communication channel (Signal Enterprise / Threema Work)
• PPE: N/A (Digital Infrastructure Domain).

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3. ROLES & RESPONSIBILITIES (RACI MATRIX)

Legend: R = Responsible, A = Accountable, C = Consulted, I = Informed

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4. STEP-BY-STEP PROCEDURE

Phase 1: Identification & Triage

• Receive automated alert or manual report via the security paging mechanism.
• Convene the emergency bridge and assign the Incident Commander (IC) role.
• Triage the anomaly; classify the incident severity (Sev-1: Critical, Sev-2: Major, Sev-3: Moderate).
• Initialize the immutable incident ledger (/var/log/sec/incidents/[INC-ID]/ledger.jsonl).
• Capture initial volatile state (memory dumps, routing tables, active network sockets) if a live host is compromised.

Phase 2: Containment (Short-Term & Long-Term)

• Network Isolation: Revoke compromised IAM credentials and isolate affected VPC subnets via security group lockdown (sg-quarantine).
• Process Freeze: Suspend affected Kubernetes namespaces or Docker containers without shutting them down (to preserve forensic memory artifacts):

  kubectl label namespace target-ns security-state=quarantined --overwrite
  kubectl patch deployment compromised-app -p '{"spec":{"replicas":0}}'
  

• Ingress Filtering: Implement temporary WAF (Web Application Firewall) blocking rules to stem active exploitation vectors.
• Verify containment boundary integrity using internal reachability probes.

Phase 3: Eradication

• Perform root cause analysis (RCA) to identify the initial access vector (IAT) and persistence mechanisms.
• Strip unauthorized SSH keys, cron jobs, backdoors, and unauthorized system accounts.
• Rebuild affected immutable infrastructure using verified-clean Infrastructure as Code (IaC) pipelines.
• Patch vulnerabilities, rotate all shared secrets, and update API keys associated with the compromised segment.

Phase 4: Recovery & Validation

• Restore data from the last known good, cryptographically verified backup.
• Bring services online sequentially, prioritizing foundational infrastructure (Identity, DNS, Storage) before application runtimes.
• Execute automated integration and regression test suites to confirm application integrity.
• Monitor error budgets, metrics, and logs closely for 48 hours post-restoration.

Phase 5: Post-Incident Review (PIR)

• Conduct a blameless post-mortem with all engineering stakeholders within 72 hours of incident closure.
• Document timeline of events, detection gaps, and response latency.
• File actionable Jira tickets for architectural hardening and preventive control upgrades.
• Archive the immutable incident ledger to secure, cold-storage compliance buckets.

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5. QUALITY ASSURANCE & PRO-TIPS

Best Practices

• Preserve Evidence First: Never power down a running virtual machine or physical server before capturing a full forensic memory snapshot; volatile state is critical for root-cause attribution.
• Maintain Clear Comms: Use a single, designated communication channel. Update executive stakeholders strictly via the IC at pre-defined intervals (e.g., every 30 minutes for Sev-1).

Common Pitfalls

• Premature Remediation: Eradicating an artifact before isolating the environment often tips off the attacker, resulting in lateral movement or data destruction.
• Scope Creep: Focusing engineering efforts on secondary symptoms while ignoring the primary attack vector.

Metric Thresholds

• Mean Time to Detect (MTTD): < 5 minutes for automated telemetry alerts.
• Mean Time to Contain (MTTC): < 15 minutes for Sev-1 containment execution.
• Dwell Time Limit: Absolute containment achieved within 1 hour of initial alert validation.

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6. FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Q: What should I do if an executive demands direct updates outside the established communication channel?
A: Direct all out-of-band inquiries to the Incident Commander. The IC will synthesize updates to prevent operational fragmentation and ensure technical teams remain focused on containment and eradication.

Q: How do we handle third-party vendor compromises that impact our supply chain (e.g., base container images)?
A: Immediately trigger Phase 2 (Containment) by purging the affected image digests from the internal container registry cache, blocking pulls via admission controllers, and deploying fallback versions of the affected artifacts.