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How can I develop a security incident response plan?

by michael•

Hey there—let’s cut to the chase. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a netsec lead at a small-to-mid-sized biz (maybe even a bigger one stuck putting out fires instead of planning ahead) and you’ve been low-key panicking about the next security blip. I get it—last quarter’s phish that almost took out the finance team? Or that weird log spike you didn’t have time to investigate? That stuff doesn’t go away. Network Security

As a netsec vendor, we work with companies every single week that sleep on incident response plans (IRPs) until a ransomware attack locks their whole network. Then they’re scrambling, panicking, and losing money by the minute. Today, I’m gonna walk you through exactly how to build a real, actionable IRP—no jargon, no 50-page binder that never gets touched, just stuff that actually works. Let’s dive in.

First off, let’s get one thing straight: an IRP isn’t something you write once and file on a shelf. It’s a living, breathing thing. We’ve seen clients build a perfect IRP, then let their team turnover, new tooling get added, or their whole business pivot—and suddenly their plan is useless. So step one? Audit your current setup first, before you type a single word.

What does that audit look like? Grab a coffee and spend a day walking through your whole stack. Start with your core assets: what can’t you live without? For example, if you’re an e-commerce shop, your payment processing server, customer database, and website are non-negotiable. If you’re a marketing agency, it might be your client project drives and employee productivity tools (Slack, Google Workspace, whatever). We once had a SaaS client who forgot their customer support ticketing system was critical—when a breach took it down, they couldn’t answer customer calls for 3 days. Oops.

Next, map your current workflow. Who gets woken up at 2 a.m. if something weird happens? Right now, is that just you, or do you have a tier 1 helpdesk, a dev team, legal, comms? Write down every single person involved, even if they “shouldn’t” be. And here’s a pro tip from our team—note their availability. If your key dev is on paternity leave for 6 weeks, that person on the list isn’t actually on call. Update that. Also, pull logs—your SIEM, firewalls, email servers—so you know where breaches usually start. 90% of incidents come from phish or unpatched vulnerabilities, so pay attention to the stuff your tools are already flagging.

Okay, audit done. Now, step two: define clear, specific incident types. Not “something bad happens,” but actual, categorized scenarios. Because if you say “we’ll handle a breach,” everyone will have a different idea of what that means. We break these into tiers internally, and it works. Let’s keep it simple for your plan:

Tier 1: Minor stuff you can fix in an hour. Like a single employee clicking a phish link that didn’t get past your spam filter, or a random malware alert on one laptop. No data loss, no customer impact. Example: “A user reports a suspicious email in their personal inbox that wasn’t quarantined.”

Tier 2: Medium impact. A small phish campaign that got 5 employees, or a server with a critical unpatched vulnerability that’s been accessed but no data leaked. Maybe minor business disruption, but no long-term hit to customers. Example: “Our customer test environment has unauthorized access from an external IP, but no production data is at risk.”

Tier 3: Full-on crisis. Ransomware locking your core servers, customer data stolen and leaked, DDoS taking down your public site for hours. This is the stuff that makes the news (internally, at least) and costs you revenue. Example: “Ransomware encrypts our primary payment processing server, and 10k customer credit card records are exfiltrated.”

Why tier them? Because you don’t need to get the CEO on the phone for a Tier 1 alert. Assign different response teams per tier, so small stuff gets fixed fast without wasting senior time. We had a client who used to loop in their CISO for every single alert—they were spending 10 hours a week on Tier 1 stuff instead of working on long-term security. Huge waste.

Step three: assign roles and responsibilities like your team depends on it (because they will). No more “someone handle this.” This is where most IRPs fail. Let’s make this concrete, not generic. Don’t write “incident response team” — write names, or clear backup roles if names are subject to change. Here’s a breakdown of the non-negotiable roles, with what they actually do:

  • Incident Commander (IC): The single point of contact for all external stakeholders (customers, regulators, the press) and internal leadership. This person needs to be decisive—no endless meetings. This shouldn’t be you if you’re the netsec person; pick a lead who can balance tech and business needs. For small teams, it might be the ops manager, or if you’re bigger, the CISO.
  • Netsec Lead: The tech person who digs through logs, finds how the breach happened, isolates affected systems, and fixes the root cause. They’re the ones calling us (hey, that’s us!) if they need extra support during a big incident.
  • Communications Lead: The person who writes all the messages to employees, customers, and the public. You don’t want the netsec team writing these—they’ll make mistakes, like saying “we might have lost data” when it’s just a minor alert. This role keeps messaging consistent and accurate.
  • Legal/Compliance Lead: The one who tells you what regulations apply. GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA—each has different timelines for notifying people. This person makes sure you don’t accidentally break a law while responding, like not notifying regulators within the required 72 hours.
  • IT Ops Lead: The person who handles restoring systems from backups, swapping out compromised hardware, and getting everything back up and running. They coordinate with the netsec lead to avoid bringing infected systems back online.
  • HR Lead: For internal stuff—like talking to employees who clicked a phish, updating security training, or handling any internal fallout (like if someone got negligent).

Here’s the big rule: no overlapping roles. If two people are in charge of the same thing, you’ll get delays. We once worked with a healthcare client where the netsec and ops lead both tried to isolate a server at the same time—they disconnected a production system by mistake, costing them $20k in downtime in an hour. Don’t do that.

Step four: build the actual response steps for each tier. Keep these as simple as a checklist—no paragraphs of text people won’t read. For Tier 1 (minor):

  1. Isolate the affected device (disconnect from network) — IT ops
  2. Run a full antivirus scan on the device — netsec
  3. Reset the user’s password and teach them how to spot that specific phish — netsec + HR
  4. Document the incident in your ticketing system — netsec
    That’s it. No fancy stuff. For Tier 2 (medium):
  5. Isolate the affected server(s) — ops + netsec
  6. Pull full logs to find the breach path — netsec
  7. Notify the IC, comms, legal, and your CEO — IC
  8. Check if any data was exfiltrated — netsec
  9. Draft a status update for customers — comms
    For Tier 3 (crisis), this gets more detailed, but the core is: isolate first, contain fast, don’t pay ransom (unless legal says it’s required and you’ve exhausted all other options—more on that later), and communicate openly.

Wait, important note about ransom: We’ve seen way too many companies pay ransoms and never get all their data back, or pay twice, or end up with a second ransomware attack because the attackers know they’ll pay. The only time paying is a good idea is if legal confirms the data is not otherwise recoverable, and regulators don’t prohibit it. We always advise clients to have offline, air-gapped backups that you test quarterly—because if your backups are also encrypted, you’re screwed. That’s a non-negotiable in every IRP.

Step five: test this thing. All the time. A plan is useless if no one knows how to use it. We recommend tabletop exercises every 6 months. What’s a tabletop? Gather your team, pick a scenario (like “ransomware hits your sales CRM”), and walk through every step of the plan out loud. Ask questions: Who’s the IC? What do we say to customers? Do we have backups? What about notifying the credit bureaus?

We ran a tabletop for a client last month, and during it, we realized they didn’t have a single backup for their customer support database. Oops—they fixed that the same week. Another client thought their comms lead knew how to write a regulatory notification, but actually, they didn’t—we helped them draft a template to keep on hand before they had an incident. And don’t just do tabletops—do a full drill once a year, where you actually simulate an incident. Isolate a test server, have your team respond, and time them. See how long it takes to contain, how long to restore, where the bottlenecks are. We once did a drill for a fintech client and found their legal lead took 4 hours to approve a customer notification—they adjusted the template so it could be pre-approved for Tier 3 incidents, cutting that time to 15 minutes.

Step six: update the plan constantly. Like, every quarter. If you hire a new netsec lead, add them to the roles. If you switch to a new backup tool, update the “restore from backup” steps. If you get a new regulation (like a state privacy law that just passed), add that to the legal compliance section. We had a client who added 50 new employees in 2023—they forgot to update their user list in their phish response steps, so when a phish hit, they didn’t have a contact list for all those new hires. That’s a quick fix, but it could have been a disaster.

Also, don’t forget employee training. A huge part of your IRP’s success is your team knowing what to do when something weird happens. Put up posters, send monthly reminders, do quick quizzes on spotting phish. We give our clients free training templates to use with their teams—because 90% of incidents are avoidable with basic employee awareness.

Wait, let’s talk about common mistakes we see all the time, so you can avoid them:

  1. Making the plan too long. If it’s more than 10 pages, no one will read it. We keep our client IRPs to 5-7 pages, with checklists for each tier.
  2. No clear escalation path. If a Tier 1 incident takes longer than 2 hours to fix, who do you loop in? Don’t leave that up to people to guess.
  3. Forgetting about third parties. If you use a SaaS tool (like Slack, Salesforce, QuickBooks), those are third-party assets that could be breached. Add a step to your plan to notify your third-party vendors if they might be affected, and to check their own incident plans.
  4. Ignoring post-incident reviews. After every real incident or drill, hold a 30-minute blameless post-mortem. What went right? What went wrong? Last month, a client had an incident where their SIEM didn’t flag a phish—they realized their rule was outdated, so we updated it, and they haven’t had a similar incident since.

Okay, so you’ve built your IRP. What now? Keep it accessible. Store it somewhere everyone can get it—like a shared Google Drive, or a tool like Notion, and add a shortcut to your desktop so people can find it fast in a crisis. Don’t email it around and expect it to be found. Also, do a 1-page cheat sheet for your on-call team, so they don’t have to scroll through the whole plan at 2 a.m. looking for the IC’s number.

At the end of the day, an IRP isn’t a box to check for compliance (though it helps with that too). It’s your safety net. We’ve had clients go from panicking through a breach to fixing it in 4 hours instead of 3 days, just because they had a solid plan. They saved hundreds of thousands in downtime and customer churn.

If you’re stuck building yours, or you want to make sure you didn’t miss anything, reach out to our team. We work with companies of all sizes to build tailored, actionable IRPs, run tabletop exercises, and make sure your plan actually works when you need it. No fancy sales pitches, just real netsec advice for real businesses. Don’t wait for a breach—start today.

Network Security References:

  1. “NIST Cybersecurity Framework: Incident Response Component” – National Institute of Standards and Technology
  2. “SANS Institute Incident Response Playbooks” – SANS Security Leadership Program
  3. “Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR) 2024” – Verizon Communications Inc.
  4. GDPR Article 33: Notification of Personal Data Breaches to the Supervisory Authority – European Union

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