The four major phases of the incident response process are:
- Preparation: This requires a team trained and ready to handle incidents. Ideally, various measures are put in place to prevent incidents from happening in the first place.
- Detection and Analysis: The team has the necessary resources to detect any incident; moreover, it is essential to analyze any detected incident further to learn about its severity.
- Containment, Eradication, and Recovery: Once an incident is detected, it is crucial to stop it from affecting other systems, eliminate it, and recover the affected systems. For instance, when we notice that a system is infected with a computer virus, we would like to stop (contain) the virus from spreading to other systems, clean (eradicate) the virus, and ensure proper system recovery.
- Post-Incident Activity: After a successful recovery, a report is produced, and the lesson learned is shared to prevent similar future incidents.