What are incident response playbooks?
An incident response (IR) playbook is a document that outlines clear steps for security teams to follow when responding to and resolving security incidents. These include malware infections, unauthorized access, DDoS attacks, data breaches, or insider threats.
Key differences between playbooks, plans, and policies
Because security terminology isn’t always standard, the following table explores the distinctions between three commonly confused terms related to IR: playbook, plan, and policy:
How to Prepare for a Cloud Cyberattack: An Actionable Incident Response Plan Template
A quickstart guide to creating a robust incident response plan - designed specifically for companies with cloud-based deployments.
| Aspect | Playbook | Plan | Policy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Scope | Actionable steps for handling a specific security incident scenario | A reference that guides overall incident response tactics | Rules and procedures for strategically handling security and compliance |
| Content | Detailed, step-by-step instructions for responding to specific security incidents | A broad strategy that specifies key actions and processes | Organization-wide rules, guidelines, and expectations |
| Detail level | Highly specific and operational | Less detailed and more comprehensive than playbooks | High-level and strategic and rarely changes |
| Quantity | Numerous specific playbooks for each scenario | Separate plans for different business units or physical locations | A single, overarching security policy |
| Audience | IR practitioners like analysts and SOC engineers | IR team leads, IT managers, and department leaders | Executives, legal, compliance officers, and stakeholders |
How do incident response playbooks make your organization safer?
Without detailed, step-by-step IR playbooks, an organization’s response to a security incident may be chaotic and lead to delays, errors, or overlooked critical steps. A haphazard response may also allow minor issues to escalate, resulting in steeper financial losses—and even reputational damage if there’s a user experience compromise or data breach.
On the other hand, effective IR playbooks provide clear, actionable steps for incident response teams to follow in the midst of a security incident scenario. These ensure the following outcomes:
Faster incident response time
Less damage from security breaches
More efficient collaboration among teams
Common scenarios to create playbooks for
Your organization will need to create separate playbooks for different attack vectors and other incident scenarios. Here are a few top priorities that IR playbooks can address:
DDoS attacks
Credential compromise
Malware infection
Data theft
Insider threats
Supply chain attacks
IAM privilege escalation
Lateral movement
Beyond creating playbooks for specific types of incidents, you can also use them to provide instructions for different teams. While security and IT teams may follow a playbook that covers technical steps for remediation, legal teams will need guidance for meeting compliance requirements and your PR team needs clear processes that allow them to communicate information about the incident.
These playbooks can also reduce your mean time to detect (MTTD) and respond (MTTR), which helps your teams stop or mitigate cyber threats before they become a bigger issue. Organizations that use IR playbooks tend to see faster resolution times and lower alert fatigue when they minimize false positives. These improvements enhance response quality by providing clarity to the teams that need it.
Playbook examples and templates from across the web
When it’s time to create a playbook for your organization, it’s better to start with pre-built templates. This saves you the time and trouble of drafting from scratch, makes sure nothing falls through the cracks, and provides a solid foundation for your own organization-specific IR playbook. Many experts provide playbook examples and templates to the security community at no charge.
Below are some example playbook templates you could start with:
Wiz’s IR Playbook Template: AWS Ransomware Attacks
The AWS ransomware IR playbook template from Wiz gives incident responders a practical, step-by-step guide for AWS environment incidents. Using this playbook, response teams can navigate ransomware incidents with a structured approach that minimizes disruption and supports swift recovery.
Here are some key highlights:
Clear, actionable steps: This template breaks down each response stage—from detection to containment—to help responders act with clarity and precision.
AWS-focused strategies: Unlike general playbooks, this one focuses on AWS to help with key targets, including unique considerations for IAM, S3, and EC2.
Enhanced preparedness and follow-up: It also offers preparation insights to bolster defenses in advance, as well as a post-incident review framework to drive continuous improvement.
Downloading this playbook equips teams with an AWS-specific roadmap for ransomware response and empowers them to act confidently and mitigate potential risks before they escalate. It’s a valuable resource for strengthening cloud incident response and protecting AWS infrastructure.
Wiz’s IR Playbook Template: Compromised AWS Credentials
Wiz’s IR playbook template for compromised AWS credentials is a step-by-step guide to help AWS users detect, investigate, contain, eradicate, and remediate incidents that involve compromised credentials.
Download this template to access the following features:
Comprehensive guidance: The template provides step-by-step instructions for how to detect, investigate, contain, and eradicate threats that involve compromised credentials in your AWS environment.
AWS-native solutions: It focuses on leveraging AWS tools like GuardDuty, Security Hub, CloudTrail, and IAM Access Analyzer for efficient, effective response.
Actionable examples: These include instructions and examples for disabling compromised credentials, isolating resources, and mitigating long-term risks.
Proactive remediation steps: The template also shows how to identify vulnerabilities and transition from long-term credentials to more secure, temporary credentials.
Wiz’s IR Playbook Template: Privilege Escalation in EKS Clusters
Wiz’s IR playbook template for EKS privilege escalation follows a structured approach to detecting, investigating, and mitigating privilege escalation in EKS.
Download this template for the below guidance:
Best practices for prevention: This playbook template shows how to enforce least privilege, secure IAM roles, and harden Kubernetes role-based access control policies to reduce risk.
Detailed detection methods: It teaches how to leverage AWS CloudTrail logs, Kubernetes audit logs, and runtime monitoring to identify unauthorized access attempts.
Effective containment and remediation strategies: The template also helps teams implement rapid response actions to isolate compromised resources, revoke excessive privileges, and prevent further escalation.
Proactive security recommendations: These show you how to strengthen your EKS security with continuous monitoring, automated enforcement, and policy-based guardrails.
NIST and the United States Federal Government
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has created these thorough, expert-vetted materials for cybersecurity and incident response:
Guide to Malware Incident Prevention and Handling for Desktops and Laptops
Data Breach Response: A Guide for Business from the Federal Trade Commission (which is more for small businesses)
Cybersecurity Incident & Vulnerability Response Playbooks from the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency
These government-sourced templates are a good foundation for a compliance-aligned response but often require cloud-specific tailoring.
CERT Société Générale
The Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) of Société Générale offers a range of publicly available playbooks for the following scenarios:
Worm infections and malware
Trademark infringement
Phishing response procedures
Insider threat investigations
DDoS attacks
Major cloud providers and other sources
Most major cloud providers offer example playbooks for scenarios that are relevant to their customers. For example, AWS offers a playbook resources hub with samples, templates, and development workshops. However, be sure to approach any provider-specific resources with caution since they may not adapt well to the multi-cloud environments that most organizations are running today.
Governments outside the US may also make IR playbook templates available at no charge to the public through their cybersecurity departments.
Components of an incident response playbook
Most playbooks group actions into stages based on an industry-standard IR framework, like those from SANS and Verizon.
Below are recommended activities for each phase of the SANS Institute’s IR workflow, as an example:
Preparation
Establish inventories of incident response tools and assets. You can consolidate tools and features using Wiz Defend instead for a full visibility solution.
Ensure that you have real-time visibility over your environment. Wiz Defend goes beyond traditional tools by providing full cloud native visibility, real-time threat detection, and automated incident response across your entire cloud stack.
Assess both your collection of activity logs and your runtime visibility from any deployed sensors to make sure you don’t have blind spots.
Detection
Identify threat vectors and risk factors based on your organization’s threat model. For example, you can map out entry points, assets, and trust levels using data flow diagrams and methods like STRIDE and MITRE ATT&CK.
Categorize and triage malware with automated tools to classify and prioritize threats based on severity and potential impact.
Monitor for suspicious or unusual patterns of credential use.
Identification
Verify and prioritize the incident according to its relative severity.
Determine the scope of the incident and the MITRE ATT&CK technique to use.
Gather and analyze indicators of compromise and map them to known threat actors. For example, you can analyze patterns and indicators and identify known threat actors using tactics, techniques, and procedures.
Containment and eradication
Determine the relevant containment action—which depends on the type of attack and the relevant tools you have in place—to cover the affected assets. One such action is cloud detection and response.
Consider runtime response and blocking specific processes for host-level incidents.
Isolate compromised entities using security group settings or rotate credentials for compromised identities during incidents that affect cloud assets.
Rebuild affected systems in the following ways:
In traditional environments, this may mean wiping machines and reinstalling software.
In containerized, cloud-based environments, this may mean updating container images to clean, secured versions and redeploying your workloads.
Restore service and patch and update defenses.
Post-incident activities
Update any relevant policies and procedures.
Review and harden your defensive posture.
Conduct a thorough root-cause analysis with all stakeholders—including IT, development, and security operations teams—to ensure that the incident doesn’t recur in the future.
Commonly overlooked best practices for cloud IR playbooks
When creating playbooks for cloud incident response scenarios, some teams overlook certain best practices that are crucial for ensuring an effective, comprehensive response. Here are seven of these best practices:
1. Multi-cloud compatibility
As your organization expands and begins to rely more on multi-cloud infrastructure, your IR playbooks should extend beyond a single-cloud strategy.
What professionals often miss: Organizations often focus on a single cloud provider when developing playbooks.
Best practice: Ensure that your playbook is adaptable to multi-cloud environments and accounts for each cloud provider’s unique controls, tools, and processes. This includes defining roles, responsibilities, and communication channels across different platforms.
🛠️Action step: Map out each provider’s shared responsibility details and service-level agreements (SLAs) in your playbook for greater clarity during incidents.
2. Cloud-specific logging and monitoring
Your cloud native environment needs streamlined monitoring and logging for close attention to IR planning.
What professionals often miss: Traditional IR playbooks may not emphasize the cloud’s unique logging and monitoring capabilities.
Best practice: Leverage cloud native logging and monitoring tools (like AWS CloudTrail, Azure Monitor, or Google Cloud Logging) for real-time visibility and historical data access. Then, ensure that logs remain centralized and accessible, even if attackers compromise the cloud environment.
🛠️Action step: Use solutions like Wiz to automate alerts and responses while unifying your entire cloud security. That way, you can see prioritized, contextualized suggestions for threats.
3. Integration with CI/CD pipelines
CI/CD workflows influence the software lifecycle, so your team should embed IR strategies within your automated systems.
What professionals often miss: Standard playbooks often don’t account for CI/CD pipelines’ dynamic nature.
Best practice: Integrate IR protocols within CI/CD pipelines to automatically halt deployments, initiate rollbacks, or quarantine affected code and services during an incident. This ensures that your system doesn’t propagate vulnerabilities during an ongoing response.
🛠️Action step: Implement infrastructure as code scanning with Wiz for agentless insights and to stop at-risk deployments automatically before they become a bigger issue.
4. Automated response and remediation
Cloud threats evolve fast—but so should your security team. That’s why automation is important. With it, you can streamline your IR playbook’s effectiveness. It also reduces human error and speeds up containment and remediation efforts.
What professionals often miss: Organizations might rely too heavily on manual processes, which can slow down response times.
Best practice: Implement automation tools and scripts to quickly execute predefined response actions, like isolating compromised resources, revoking credentials, or deploying security patches.
🛠️Action step: Initiate remediation playbooks conditionally, with parameters for risk severity, data sensitivity and other details, to combine automation with intelligent gating.
5. Cross-team collaboration
Effective security hinges on your security team and employees practicing responsible day-to-day habits. That’s why collaboration should be a main feature within both your technical and non-technical workflows.
What professionals often miss: IR playbooks sometimes fail to clearly define collaboration between different teams, especially in cloud contexts.
Best practice: Establish clear communication protocols and collaboration frameworks that involve DevOps, security, compliance, and cloud engineering teams.
🛠️Action step: Build checklists for your teams and departments with real-time protocols, approvals, and timelines for both technical and non-technical employees.
6. Cloud service provider SLAs and shared responsibility models
Shared responsibility means balancing obligations between cloud service providers (CSPs) and your organization. Developing a realistic IR playbook is a key part of this relationship.
What professionals often miss: Teams often miss the nuances of shared responsibility models and SLAs.
Best practice: Clearly define the responsibilities between your organization and the CSP, ensure that your IR playbook includes steps to engage with the provider during an incident, and understand what support or data access you can expect under the SLA.
🛠️Action step: Create incident communication protocols with your CSP to minimize setbacks and improve support when there’s a critical event.
7. Data residency and compliance considerations
Cloud incidents can trigger legal and compliance responses connected to industry expectations and data locations.
What professionals often miss: Playbooks may overlook the importance of data residency laws and compliance requirements in cloud environments.
Best practice: Tailor your incident response playbook to ensure compliance with data residency laws and industry regulations for cloud compliance. This includes detailing how to handle data breaches that involve cloud-stored data, especially in multi-jurisdictional scenarios.
🛠️Action step: Use compliance heatmaps and framework resources, like Wiz’s cloud compliance solution, to audit for incident response expectations.
Wiz: Simplified IR playbooks with automation and integration
Wiz is an integrated, cloud native application protection platform that brings together multiple solutions to protect your organization from advanced threats. By leveraging automated workflows and powerful analytics, our platform streamlines your IR playbooks with built-in automation and advanced analytics so your teams can move quickly through containment, eradication, and recovery.
Additionally, we provide free incident response playbooks that include best practices, research, and expertise so you can ready your organization for emerging threats. To learn more about how you can improve your organization’s incident response, download them today: