How do you use incident response frameworks and tools to streamline your triage process?

1 What is incident triage and why is it important?

Incident triage is the process of identifying, categorizing, and prioritizing incidents based on their severity, impact, and urgency. It helps you to determine which incidents need immediate attention, which ones can be handled later, and which ones can be ignored or closed. Incident triage is important because it helps you to allocate your resources efficiently, reduce the risk of escalation or damage, and improve your incident response performance and metrics.

3 What are some examples of incident response frameworks?

There are numerous incident response frameworks available, so you can choose the one that best fits your organization's needs and goals. The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) offers a framework known as NIST SP 800-61, which covers the four phases of incident response: preparation, detection and analysis, containment, eradication, and recovery, as well as post-incident activity. The SANS Institute's SANS PICERL framework covers six phases of incident response and provides checklists, templates, and tools for each phase. Additionally, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and the International Electrotechnical Commission (IEC) have developed ISO/IEC 27035 which covers five phases of incident response including plan and prepare, detect and report, assess and decide, respond, and learn and improve. All of these frameworks provide guidance on incident handling procedures, coordination and information sharing, incident reporting and metrics, roles and responsibilities, incident classification and prioritization.

5 What are some examples of incident response tools?

When it comes to incident response tools, there is a variety of options to choose from, depending on your budget, infrastructure, and requirements. Splunk Enterprise Security provides a security information and event management (SIEM) platform to detect, investigate, and respond to incidents. TheHive is a scalable, open-source, and free incident response platform with collaboration, case management, workflow, and integration capabilities. Volatility is a memory forensics framework that helps analyze memory dumps from various operating systems and platforms with plugins, modules, and scripts for forensic tasks like process listing, file extraction, registry analysis or malware detection.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?