What is an incident response checklist?
An incident response checklist is a step-by-step guide that tells your security team exactly what to do when a cyberattack happens. Think of it as your emergency playbook that keeps everyone on track when things get chaotic.
Unlike a general incident response plan that covers policies and strategies, your checklist focuses on specific actions. It walks you through each phase of handling an incident, from the moment you detect a threat to learning from what happened afterward. This structured approach prevents your team from missing critical steps when they're under pressure.
The checklist typically covers six main phases: preparation, identification, containment, eradication, recovery, and lessons learned. Each phase contains specific tasks, contact information, and decision points that guide your response. For example, during identification, you might need to validate alerts, determine the incident's scope, and classify its severity level.
Quickstart Incident Response Plan Template
Build a solid foundation for crisis management with our step-by-step checklist and ready-to-use template.
Why incident response checklists are critical for modern security operations
Security incidents happen fast, often outside business hours when your team is running on limited resources. Ransomware remains a leading action in breaches per the latest Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, and third-party compromises have significantly increased in recent years. These trends underscore the need for structured, repeatable response procedures.
Modern cloud environments make these challenges worse. Resources spin up and down automatically, attack surfaces change constantly, and traditional security models don't work anymore. A well-designed checklist addresses these complexities by including cloud-specific procedures like API security checks, container forensics, and serverless function monitoring.
Your checklist also serves as a training tool and knowledge repository. New team members can quickly understand response procedures, while experienced staff have a reliable reference during high-stress situations. This approach spreads incident response knowledge across your team, so you're not dependent on just a few key people.
The essential IR checklist by phase
An effective incident response checklist follows the standard phases of the incident response lifecycle. Combine this overview with the detailed 'cloud-native IR checklist' below to avoid duplication.
The essential cloud-native IR checklist by phase
Phase 1: Preparation
Preparation is the foundation of effective incident response, focusing on building readiness before threats materialize. This phase ensures your team has the tools, knowledge, and resources to respond quickly when incidents occur. The goal is to establish a secure baseline environment with comprehensive visibility, tested recovery mechanisms, and trained personnel. Without proper preparation, even skilled teams struggle during active incidents, often missing critical evidence or making recovery errors under pressure.
Map your cloud environment completely – identify and document all critical assets, including ephemeral resources, serverless functions, and container deployments with their owners, sensitivity levels, and business impact ratings.
Configure comprehensive cloud logging across all providers – enable CloudTrail in AWS, Activity Logs in Azure, and Cloud Audit Logs in GCP with appropriate retention periods (minimum 90 days) and immutable storage settings.
Implement automated backups and cross-region replication for data stores (e.g., RDS snapshots, blob/object versioning). Verify restores monthly in an isolated account, subscription, or project, validating both data integrity and access controls.
Deploy cloud-native detection tools with API-focused monitoring capabilities – create custom detection rules for identity-based attacks, privilege escalation, and data exfiltration scenarios common in cloud environments.
Establish secure baselines for all Infrastructure-as-Code templates and container images; implement automated drift detection and policy enforcement in CI/CD pipelines to block unauthorized modifications before deployment.
Conduct cloud-specific tabletop exercises quarterly that address multi-cloud scenarios, serverless attacks, and container escape vulnerabilities.
Phase 2: Detection and Analysis
Detection and analysis form the intelligence-gathering stage of incident response where you identify, validate, and scope security incidents. This critical phase determines whether an alert represents a genuine threat and establishes the incident's boundaries and severity. Effective detection reduces attacker dwell time – remember that threat actors typically operate undetected for 11 days on average. The primary goals are to quickly distinguish real threats from false alarms, understand the full extent of compromise, and gather sufficient evidence to guide containment decisions.
Correlate alerts across cloud provider logs, CSPM findings, and workload security tools – use graph-based analysis to identify connections between seemingly isolated events.
Execute cloud-specific triage steps that capture ephemeral evidence – preserve container runtime data (e.g., process, network, file metadata), snapshot disks/volumes, and ensure function/service logs (e.g., CloudWatch, Azure Monitor, Cloud Logging) are retained.
Map affected identities and their permission boundaries across your cloud environment – identify all resources accessible to compromised credentials through direct and transitive permissions.
Analyze cloud infrastructure configurations and recent changes through API calls and IaC commits – look for suspicious provisioning activities, policy modifications, or unusual API patterns.
Capture VPC/VNet/VPC-SC flow logs and API call histories (e.g., CloudTrail, Azure Resource Manager, GCP Admin Activity) with synchronized time sources (UTC/NTP) to build a precise cross-cloud timeline.
Calculate blast radius using cloud resource metadata and service relationships – determine which data stores, applications, and customer-facing services could be impacted.
Phase 3: Containment
Containment focuses on limiting damage and preventing incident escalation by isolating affected systems and blocking attack vectors. This phase requires balancing aggressive isolation with business continuity needs – you need to stop the threat without unnecessarily disrupting critical operations. The primary goals are to prevent lateral movement, preserve forensic evidence before it's altered, and implement immediate controls that buy time for full remediation. Effective containment significantly reduces the financial impact of breaches by limiting the scope of compromise.
Implement cloud-native isolation through security groups, service policies, and virtual network boundaries – create containment zones around affected resources without disrupting critical business services.
Revoke active access tokens and rotate affected API keys immediately – use 'break-glass' procedures if normal privilege elevation paths are blocked (e.g., AWS: emergency IAM user; Azure: emergency access accounts; GCP: break-glass org admin).
Quarantine instead of terminate where feasible – e.g., set AWS Lambda reserved concurrency to 0, detach instance roles, move instances to a quarantine security group or subnet, apply deny policies – then capture forensic data and snapshots before decommissioning
Apply temporary WAF rules, route controls, and network ACL/security group updates to block command-and-control patterns while maintaining legitimate traffic; document changes for rollback.
Isolate affected cloud accounts by implementing strict cross-account access policies and temporarily disabling federation with compromised identity providers.
Activate enhanced cloud logging and deploy honeytokens in the affected environment to track attacker movements and techniques during containment.
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Phase 4: Eradication
Eradication involves completely removing the threat from your environment and addressing the vulnerabilities that enabled the attack. This phase goes beyond temporary containment to permanently eliminate all traces of the attacker's presence. The goal is to systematically remove malware, backdoors, and unauthorized changes while closing security gaps that could allow re-infection. Without thorough eradication, attackers often maintain hidden footholds that enable them to resume operations days or weeks later.
Identify and remove unauthorized Infrastructure-as-Code modifications in your repositories – audit all template changes against approved pull requests and validate integrity of deployment pipelines.
Scan all container images and serverless function code for backdoors and malicious packages – rebuild all images from verified base layers with integrity verification.
Revoke and reissue all cloud service credentials – rotate not just obvious user keys but also CI/CD pipeline tokens, service principals, and machine identity certificates.
Right-size excessive permissions using least-privilege automation based on actual usage; stage changes and monitor for breakage before broad rollout.
Patch vulnerable cloud services and APIs – implement version upgrades for managed services and apply security patches to cloud-hosted applications.
Quarantine or revert attacker-modified data using versioning/history; coordinate any purges with Legal/Compliance and IR leads to preserve evidence and meet retention/hold obligations.
Phase 5: Recovery
Recovery focuses on safely restoring operations to normal functioning after an incident has been contained and eradicated. This phase requires careful planning to avoid reintroducing compromised elements or triggering additional security issues during restoration. The primary goals are to return systems to full production capability, validate their security and functionality, and implement enhanced monitoring to catch any signs of persistent threats. Recovery should be methodical rather than rushed – the final steps of incident response often determine whether the attacker truly remains excluded from your environment.
Deploy clean cloud infrastructure using verified IaC templates with integrity validation – rebuild environments from known-good code rather than remediating existing resources.
Restore from pre-attack snapshots/backups only after malware/IoC scanning and integrity verification; perform restores into isolated environments first, then promote to production.
Implement progressive traffic shifting using cloud load balancers – gradually route traffic to recovered services while monitoring for anomalies.
Validate posture with unified policies across clouds so guardrails remain consistent from rebuild to release.
Deploy enhanced cloud-native monitoring with custom alert rules targeting the specific TTPs observed during the incident.
Enable additional detective controls like cloud access anomaly detection, sensitive action logging, and privilege escalation monitoring.
Phase 6: Lessons Learned
The lessons learned phase transforms incident response from a reactive process into a cycle of continuous improvement. This often-skipped phase is where organizations extract maximum value from the incident by analyzing what happened, why it succeeded, and how defenses can be strengthened. The goals are to document the incident thoroughly, identify process gaps, implement security improvements, and share knowledge that benefits both your organization and the broader security community. Codify improvements into standards (e.g., IaC modules, policies, guardrails), update runbooks/playbooks, and track follow-up actions with owners and due dates.
Analyze cloud architecture weaknesses exposed during the incident – identify architectural improvements like improved segmentation, reduced trust relationships, or enhanced identity boundaries.
Quantify incident costs specific to cloud operations – calculate additional compute costs, data transfer fees, and cloud-specific recovery expenses alongside business impact metrics.
Update cloud security guardrails and preventative policies – implement new SCPs, Azure Policy rules, or GCP Organization Policies that would have prevented the attack.
Enhance automated response capabilities – develop cloud-native runbooks and automation that accelerate future response to similar incidents.
Share cloud-specific indicators of compromise with your industry peers – contribute API abuse patterns, IAM attack techniques, and container escape methods to threat intelligence communities.
Conduct cloud security architecture review – implement improvements to your cloud landing zone design, identity federation model, and multi-cloud governance approach based on incident findings.
Best practices for implementing and maintaining incident response checklists
Regular testing through simulated incidents reveals gaps and inefficiencies in your checklist before real incidents occur. Schedule monthly tabletop exercises focusing on different scenarios – ransomware, data breach, insider threat – to validate procedures and build muscle memory. Document observations and update your checklist based on exercise outcomes.
Version control and change management ensure your checklist evolves without losing historical context. Track who made changes, when, and why, maintaining an audit trail of improvements. Store checklists in multiple formats and locations – digital copies in secure repositories, printed copies in incident response kits, and offline copies accessible during system outages.
Integration with existing tools and workflows reduces friction during incident response. Connect checklist tasks to ticketing systems, automate evidence collection where possible, and establish API integrations for common response actions. However, maintain manual fallback procedures for scenarios where automation fails or systems are compromised.
Continuous improvement through metrics and feedback loops drives checklist effectiveness. Track metrics like time to detection, time to containment, and checklist completion rates. The industry average shows attackers lurk for 11 days before getting caught. When you find them yourself, it's 10 days. When someone else tells you? That jumps to 26 days. These numbers make rapid detection your most important metric. Survey responders after incidents to identify pain points and missing steps. Incorporate threat intelligence about emerging attack techniques to proactively update response procedures.
How Wiz Defend streamlines cloud incident response workflows
Wiz Defend transforms traditional manual checklist execution into intelligent, automated workflows that accelerate every phase of incident response. Rather than manually correlating alerts across multiple tools, the Wiz Security Graph instantly visualizes attack paths and blast radius, showing how an incident could spread through your environment. This graph-based context eliminates hours of manual investigation, allowing teams to immediately understand incident scope and prioritize containment actions.
The platform's curated detection rules and behavioral analytics eliminate the noise that overwhelms traditional security tools. Instead of chasing thousands of alerts, teams focus on genuine threats with automated risk scoring that considers factors like data sensitivity, identity privileges, and network exposure. This contextual prioritization ensures critical incidents receive immediate attention while reducing alert fatigue.
Wiz's lightweight runtime sensors continuously collect forensic data from containers, serverless functions, and cloud workloads – capturing evidence even from ephemeral resources before they disappear. This automated evidence collection ensures teams have the data they need for investigation without scrambling to preserve artifacts manually.
Automated response playbooks can execute containment actions (e.g., quarantine security groups, credential revocation, policy updates) immediately upon threat detection, with human-in-the-loop approvals for high-impact changes. These playbooks can isolate workloads, revoke credentials, and modify security groups without human intervention, dramatically reducing mean time to contain. Integration with existing SIEM and SOAR platforms preserves current workflows while adding cloud-native intelligence.
Most importantly, Wiz Code enables remediation by tracing runtime incidents back to their source in code. Rather than repeatedly responding to the same vulnerabilities, teams can fix the root cause in development, preventing future incidents. This shift from reactive response to proactive prevention fundamentally improves security posture over time.
Ready to move from manual checklists to automated, cloud-native workflows? Request a demo to see how graph-powered detections, agentless context, and human-in-the-loop playbooks accelerate detection, investigation, and containment – while reducing analyst toil.
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