Building Incident Response Playbooks
When to Use
- Establishing or maturing an incident response program from scratch
- Documenting procedures for a new incident type after a novel attack
- Automating response workflows in a SOAR platform (Cortex XSOAR, Splunk SOAR)
- Preparing for compliance audits requiring documented IR procedures (SOC 2, PCI-DSS, HIPAA)
- Conducting a gap analysis of existing IR capabilities against specific threat scenarios
Do not use for one-time ad hoc investigations; playbooks are reusable procedure documents, not case-specific reports.
Prerequisites
- Organizational risk assessment identifying top incident scenarios by likelihood and impact
- NIST SP 800-61r3 or SANS PICERL framework adopted as the organizational IR standard
- Asset inventory with business criticality ratings and data classification
- RACI chart defining roles: Incident Commander, SOC analysts, system administrators, legal, communications
- Existing detection capabilities inventory (SIEM rules, EDR detections, IDS signatures)
- SOAR platform access if building automated playbooks
Workflow
Step 1: Select and Scope the Incident Type
Define the specific scenario the…
