What are the 7 phases of incident response in cyber security?

Introduction to Incident Response in the AI Age

So, you think your old incident response plan from 2019 still works? Honestly, with ai agents now acting as both the attackers and the "employees" in your system, the old ways are pretty much toast.

Modern incident response (IR) isn't just about fixing a server anymore—it’s about managing a messy ecosystem of automated identities and lightning-fast threats. According to Cyber Management Alliance, preparation is the "ultimate step" because it assumes you will be hit eventually.

• The Workforce Shift: We aren't just protecting humans. In a modern azure entra setup, you're managing thousands of service principals and ai agents that can be hijacked in milliseconds.
• Industry Specifics: In healthcare, a rogue ai agent with "delete" permissions on a patient database is a nightmare scenario. In retail, it could be a stealthy api scrape of customer loyalty points.
• Complexity: You need more than just "Detection." You need triage that understands blast radius in a cloud-native world.

Anyway, the NIST Computer Security Incident Handling Guide (SP 800-61) is still the gold standard for its 4-step cycle, but smart teams are expanding it into a 7-phase model—similar to the SANS framework—to catch the granular details that the basic nist model misses. (Breaking Your Team's Biggest Success Barrier: 7 Simple ...)

Let's dive into Phase 1: Preparation.

Phase 1: Preparation is the Secret Sauce

Look, if you're waiting for the sirens to go off before you check your permissions, you’ve already lost the game. Preparation isn't just a "task"—it's the only thing keeping your enterprise from a total meltdown when an ai agent goes rogue.

You gotta treat your identity providers like the crown jewels. This is where you set up things like SCIM (System for Cross-domain Identity Management) and SAML (Security Assertion Markup Language). Basically, SCIM automates how you provision and—more importantly—de-provision those ai agents across all your apps instantly. If your okta or azure entra isn't tightened up now, attackers will use your own automation against you.

• Risk assessment for ai agents: You need to audit what these bots can actually do. If an ai has "delete" permissions on a production database in healthcare, that's a massive liability.
• Forensic Readiness: As recommended by NIST guidelines, you need to ensure your logging is actually turned on before the hit so you have evidence to look at later.
• Contact trees: Don't be the person scrambling for a phone number at 3 AM. Microsoft suggests defining clear roles and responsibilities so everyone knows their job before the stress hits.
• Training: Your staff needs to spot messy social engineering. Hardening your "human firewall" is just as vital as patching a server.

Next, we'll see how to actually spot the fire.

Phase 2: Identification and Finding the Breach

So you've got your plan ready, but how do you actually know when the building is on fire? Identification is basically where you separate the "background noise" of a busy network from a genuine disaster.

Honestly, it’s a lot harder than it sounds because ai agents and automated service principals in systems like okta constantly trigger false positives. You don't want your team chasing ghosts at 2 am. According to AuditBoard, you need to distinguish between precursors (signs a hit is coming) and indicators (signs you're already compromised).

Modern identification relies on your siem and soar tools to flag weirdness. It’s not just about a failed login anymore; it’s about a service principal suddenly making thousands of api calls to a sensitive healthcare database.

• Filtering out the junk: Use automated playbooks to squash low-level alerts so your humans can focus on the "Golden Hour" of detection.
• Attack path mapping: Trace how an attacker moved from a retail web portal to your backend azure entra identities.
• Severity classification: Not every ping is a p1. If a bot scrapes loyalty points, that's bad, but if it's changing admin permissions, that's a "drop everything" moment.

Anyway, once you're sure it’s a real breach, you gotta move fast to stop the bleeding. Next, we look at how to actually lock things down without breaking your whole business.

Phase 3: Containing the Situation Quickly

Once you've spotted a breach, you gotta stop the bleeding before your whole network is toast. Containment is basically about building a digital firebreak so that rogue ai agents or compromised accounts don't wreck the rest of your shop.

Honestly, it's a balancing act. If you just pull the plug on everything, you might lose vital evidence or break a critical business flow in a retail app or a healthcare portal. You need a mix of short-term and long-term moves.

• Short-term isolation: Kill the specific api tokens or session cookies for the hijacked ai agent. This stops the immediate damage without rebooting every server.
• Model Isolation: If the threat is an autonomous ai agent, you might need to isolate the entire model environment or "freeze" its weights to prevent it from learning or adapting during the attack.
• Long-term segmentation: Shift workloads to isolated vlans or rotate all keys in your okta or azure entra environment.
• Preserve evidence: Don't just delete the malware; as recommended by NIST guidelines, you need to capture a snapshot for forensics later.

Tools like AuthFyre help here by managing the identity governance for those automated bots, making it easier to revoke access instantly without a manual scavenger hunt.

Anyway, once the threat is boxed in, we gotta actually scrub the system clean. Next is Phase 4: Eradication.

Phase 4: Eradication and Removing the Root Cause

So, you boxed the intruder in. Great. But now you gotta actually kick them out and scrub the floors. Eradication is about killing the "root cause" so they don't just pop back in through a back door ten minutes later. Honestly, it's the most tedious part because if you miss one tiny misconfiguration, you're back at square one.

According to the previously mentioned guide by nist, this phase is where you stop playing defense and start the cleanup. It’s not just about deleting a virus; it’s about fixing the hole in the fence.

• Emergency Rotation: Immediately rotate passwords and api keys for any service accounts that were touched. This is the "kick them out" phase to ensure the attacker loses their current access.
• Prompt Injection Filtering: If an ai agent was tricked, you need to update your input filters to block the specific prompt injections used by the attacker.
• Account Purge: Delete any unauthorized user accounts created during the breach. In a retail setup, check if they spun up new "admin" identities in your okta or azure entra.
• Patching: If they got in through an unpatched enterprise software bug, fix it now. A Go Cloud Architects video notes that remediation must include fixing those specific misconfigurations to prevent persistence.

Anyway, once the system is clean, you can finally start bringing things back online. Next, we’ll look at Phase 5: Recovery.

Phase 5: Recovery and Getting Back to Work

So we finally kicked the hackers out—now comes the part where you actually get back to business without accidentally reinfecting the whole shop. Recovery is about more than just hitting the "on" switch; it's a slow, methodical crawl back to normalcy while watching your back.

Honestly, the biggest mistake people make is rushing this phase because the ceo is breathing down their neck. You gotta validate everything first.

• Immutable Backups: Only use the safe ones. If you restore from a snapshot that already had the malware, you're back at square one.
• Final Hardening: Now that the emergency is over, do a full audit of your identity policies. This is where you do the "Final Hardening" of credentials to ensure long-term integrity, which is different from the emergency rotations you did in Phase 4.
• Integrity Checks: As recommended by NIST guidelines, you need to verify system logs and metrics to spot any weird anomalies.

In finance, this might mean reconciling every transaction since the breach, while a retail shop might just need to verify their customer loyalty api is clean. Anyway, once the systems are humming again, we need to talk about the meeting everyone hates: Lessons Learned.

Phase 6: Lessons Learned (The Part Everyone Skips)

Honestly, most teams just want to close the ticket and go home after a breach, but skipping this is how you get hacked the same way twice. It's the "post-incident" phase where you actually turn a disaster into a better defense for your okta or azure entra setup.

• Stakeholder debrief: You gotta get the ceo and legal in a room to review if the response plan actually held water.
• Identity policy tuning: Look at the attack path—if an ai agent was hijacked, you need to tighten those SCIM/SAML permissions we talked about in Phase 1 immediately.
• Audit trail: Document everything for compliance because regulators love asking for these reports six months later.

Next, we gotta talk about closing the loop so you aren't guessing during the next fire.

Phase 7: Closing the Loop and Continuous Improvement

Phase 7 isn't just a final step—it’s how you feed everything back into Phase 1 (Preparation). Muscle memory is the only thing standing between a calm response and a total circus when your scim integrations start failing during a live hit. You can have the best playbooks in the world, but if the team hasn't actually clicked the buttons under pressure, they're gonna freeze.

• Tabletop exercises: Run verbal simulations of a rogue ai agent or a ransomware strike. As mentioned earlier by the Cyber Management Alliance, testing is how you find the gaps before hackers do.
• Drill the technicals: Actually test your saml failovers and okta session revocations. If your "kill switch" takes twenty minutes to find in the azure entra portal, you've already lost.
• Refine the flow: Use results from these drills to update your docs. This ensures your Preparation phase is always getting stronger.

I've seen finance teams nail their recovery because they practiced rotating api keys every quarter. Honestly, just do the work now so you aren't guessing later.

Stay safe out there.