
Learn to define incidents and events, prepare written procedures, and respond with a structured six-stage approach: preparation, identification, containment, eradication, recovery, and lessons learned.
Prepare people, policy, data, software, hardware, and communications; train through security awareness and phishing tests; document everything to support incident handling and response.
Form a multidisciplinary incident handling team with clear roles and bounded access from security, operations, legal, HR, and public affairs; train, report, and use tools to detect, respond, and recover.
Identify incidents across network perimeter, host, and application logs by correlating data from firewalls, IDS/IPS, antivirus, and servers; alert early and maintain situational awareness to stop incidents before spreading.
Learn to detect cybersecurity incidents through system logging and monitoring, identify unusual processes, services, or network activity, and assess evidence, impact, and possible actions.
Deploy a small on-site team to survey the situation, secure the area, and categorize incidents by severity, criticality, and sensitivity for informed, timely response.
Isolate the infected system via VLAN and preserve evidence by disk imaging. Then apply containment and hardening with patches, IPS deployment, password changes, and removal of attacker accounts and backdoors.
Eradicate attackers artifacts after containment; identify cause, isolate the attack, and rebuild from a clean backup or reinstall with patches to strengthen defenses, including vulnerability scanning and hardening.
Validate the system before restoring operations, run vulnerability scans, verify test plans and baseline documentation, perform penetration tests, and monitor post-restore activity with IDS/IPS and logs.
Document lessons learned and develop follow-up report with consensus and sign-offs to improve incident handling. Collect data from perimeter defenses, firewalls, application, host, and network defenses to foster shared responsibility.
This course covers the six phases of incident handling and responding as follows:
0- Introduction: Includes the definition of an event, incident, as well as the difference between them
1- Preparation Phase: Shows the elements of preparation and the team building,
2- Identification Phase: Demonstrates where identification occurs and the assessment for identification
3- Containment: Explains the deployment and categorization needed as well as the short/long- term actions taken
4- Eradication: Stresses on restoring systems and improving defenses
5- Recovery: Elaborates the validation and monitoring required for attacked systems
6- Lessons Learned: Confirms the importance of meeting as a team to fix and improve and to share our experiences with others
The course targets cybersecurity officers and incident handlers, and the material requires only basic IT knowledge and a little of cybersecurity background.
It is worth noting that incident response is a structured approach to handle various types of security incidents, cyber threats, and data breaches. The incident response methodology aims to identify, contain, and minimize the cost of a cyberattack or a live incident. A well-built incident response (IR) plan can fix a potential vulnerability to prevent future attacks, but it is not the sum game. Response is a part of Incident Handling which in turn looks at the logistics, communications, synchronicity, and planning required to resolve an incident.