From Theory to Action: A Practical Guide to Writing Effective Incident Response Procedures

When a security incident hits, the last thing you want is your team scrambling, unsure of what to do next. This is where Incident Response (IR) procedures come in—they are the detailed, step-by-step playbooks that turn your high-level strategy into concrete action.

Many technical teams make the mistake of jumping straight into writing procedures. It’s an understandable impulse; we want to get to the hands-on part. But without the proper foundation, procedures built in a vacuum can miss critical business requirements or lack the authority they need to be effective.

Procedures are the third and final piece of a robust IR framework. If you haven’t already, we highly recommend reading up on how to build the first two: the IR Policy (the why) and the IR Plan (the what and who). Today, we’re diving into the how—crafting procedures that are tailored to your organization and ready for the real world.

Our approach is guided by industry best practices, like those found in the invaluable NIST 800-61 publication, which provides a fantastic framework for organizing and handling incidents. Let’s get started.

Step 1: Start with Your Policy and Plan to Define Your Mandate

Before you write a single command, you must understand the mandate given to you by your organization’s IR policy and plan. These documents answer the crucial question: “What are we actually responsible for?” Without this clarity, you risk wasting countless hours writing procedures you’ll never use.

Ask yourself these questions, which should be defined in your policy and plan:

• Scope of Responsibility: What specific geographies, business units, or network segments are we tasked with protecting? Are any explicitly out of scope?

• Business Priorities: Which revenue lines, products, or services are most critical to the business? This helps you prioritize actions when multiple systems are affected.

• Key Metrics: What are the expectations from leadership? You need to know your target response times (e.g., Mean Time to Acknowledge/Respond) and reporting timelines to build procedures that can meet those goals.

Knowing what you are and aren’t responsible for is the essential first step. It focuses your efforts and ensures your procedures are aligned with the business’s strategic objectives.

Step 2: Identify Your Environments and Severity Levels

Not all incidents are created equal, and not all environments are the same. Your procedures need the flexibility to adapt to different situations. This means defining the “terrain” you’ll be operating in and the severity of the threat you’re facing.

Understand Your Technical Environments

You might be able to use a single set of procedures for your entire organization, but it’s more likely you’ll need variations. Consider the differences between:

• On-Premise vs. Cloud: Do your tools and access methods differ?

• Corporate IT vs. OT/Industrial Control Systems: These are vastly different worlds with unique constraints.

• Legal & Compliance Boundaries: How do requirements like GDPR in Europe or other regional data laws affect how you can collect and process data?

Your procedures must reflect the reality of the environment, including the tools available, access limitations, and legal considerations.

Use Severity to Drive Your Actions

Severity levels, which should be defined in your IR policy, provide the starting point for your response playbook. The actions you take for a minor event should be drastically different from how you handle a major breach.

For example:

• High Severity (e.g., Root-level compromise, ransomware): This might trigger waking up the CISO at 2 AM, engaging an expensive third-party IR retainer, and activating the legal team.

• Low Severity (e.g., Unsuccessful reconnaissance scan): This may only require logging the event and creating a ticket for routine analysis by a junior analyst.

By mapping procedures to severity levels, you create a “choose-your-own-adventure” guide that empowers your team to make the right call under pressure.

Step 3: Get Technical—Define Your Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs)

Now we get to the fun part. With your mandate and context established, it’s time to document the specific technical TTPs your team will use. This is where you translate theory into keyboard-level commands.

When defining your TTPs, you must consider your unique mix of people, processes, and technology. What works for a Fortune 500 company with unlimited resources won’t work for a startup. Be realistic about what your team can do with the tools you have.

A great way to structure this is by using a Collection Management Framework (CMF). A CMF helps you systematically answer key data questions for each environment:

1. What data is being collected? Do you have full packet capture, endpoint logs from an EDR, or just firewall logs? What are your visibility gaps (e.g., in SaaS applications or with Zero Trust architectures)?

2. How will we process the data? What tools will analysts use ($EnCase$, $Volatility$, $Kibana$)? How will you scale analysis if you’re dealing with terabytes of logs?

3. How will we analyze the data? Are your analysts trained on the specific tools and data types they will encounter? Do you need different procedures for analyzing Windows, Linux, or cloud-native artifacts?

This step is often the most time-consuming, but it’s also the most critical. These detailed, tailored TTPs are what your team will rely on when an incident is live and every second counts.

Step 4: Practice, Update, and Train for Accountability

Incident response procedures are not a “set-it-and-forget-it” document. They are living guides that must evolve with your organization, your technology, and the threat landscape.

• Document and Practice: The best way to find flaws in your procedures is to use them. Tabletop exercises, where you walk through a scenario in a conference room, are great. Even better are live-fire exercises where your team has to pull actual data and test their tools.

• Establish an Update Process: After every real incident or exercise, conduct a post-mortem. What worked? What didn’t? Was a procedure confusing or a data source unavailable? This feedback is gold. Use it to refine and update your documentation. Plan for, at minimum, an annual review of all IR procedures.

• Train and Hold Accountable: If you build this fantastic resource and your team doesn’t use it, you’ve wasted your time. Train your analysts on the procedures so there are no surprises. When they know what to do and how to do it, they can act decisively, avoid common biases, and ultimately reduce the incident’s impact on the business. The goal is to lower your Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) and get the organization back on its feet faster.

Putting It All Together

By grounding your procedures in your policy, tailoring them to your specific environments, defining clear technical actions, and committing to a cycle of practice and improvement, you create a powerful tool. You move your security program from a state of chaotic reaction to one of streamlined, predictable, and effective response.

This article is the third in our series on building a complete Incident Response program. Be sure to check out our previous guides on creating an IR Policy and IR Plan.

Need a hand building an IR plan that truly protects your business? Reach out to us today!