Incident Response Preparedness: Technical Incident Response

Part 2

Overview | Detection Engineering | Technical IR Readiness | 3rd Party Vendor Management | 3rd Party Partners & Retainers | Managing Executives in a Crisis | Reporting Readiness | Final Thoughts

Continuing in our series on Incident Response, when an incident hits, speed matters. Not just how fast your team spots the problem—but how quickly you can act without creating more damage. For SMBs, technical incident response (IR) preparedness means having the right tools, data, and workflows pre-built and tested.

The good news? Your smaller footprint means you can make containment and recovery workflows far simpler than what enterprises have to manage. The challenge is ensuring that those workflows exist before an incident happens—and that they address both your internal environment and your product or service itself.

 Step 1: Build a Clean Asset & Configuration Baseline

You can’t defend what you can’t see.

• Maintain an up-to-date asset inventory: laptops, servers, SaaS platforms, cloud workloads, production systems.

• Track configuration baselines for endpoints, cloud resources, and production deployments so you can spot drift or tampering.

• Tools like Microsoft Intune and AWS Config can automate some of this collection, but you need additional tools to help maintain it.

• Typical tools for the SMB:

  • Cloud Security Posture Management tool (CSPM) - think ImpacLabs, Wiz.

  • GRC Risk Tool that can help inventory some of these things - think Drata 

Step 2: Enable Rapid Containment Tools

Containment is about stopping the bleeding without breaking the business (though sometimes this is a decision that needs to be made). That means:

• Endpoint isolation via EDR tools (CrowdStrike or Microsoft Defender can quarantine endpoints in seconds).

• Network segmentation in your office, cloud, and production environments so you can block lateral movement.

  • Good news here is due to the simplicity of your network, this can sometimes be very straight forward.

  • Remember network segmentation isn’t always about the network. This means ensuring you don’t share admin access with your email access, and you lock down who has access to your cloud environments. See What Drives Security Decisions in Small and Medium Businesses — CipherNorth

• Credential reset workflows with MFA enforcement, are ready to execute in bulk if accounts are compromised. (And remember this applies to your employees and your customers)

  • This is a red flag area - numerous threat actors, such as Scattered Spider, take advantage of resetting passwords and MFA tokens to gain access to networks.

• Cloud-native isolation features:

• Azure: Just-In-Time VM access

• AWS: Security Group lockdowns

• GCP: VPC firewall rule isolation

• Product-level kill switches so you can disable functionality or take the product offline quickly if necessary.  Ask yourself two questions:

  • Do you know your bare minimum regression testing requirements in order to get a bugfix/patch out to your main client application within minutes/hours?

  • Are you able to disable certain features or integrations with your product if there is a downstream issue without putting up a ‘we’re down’ web page?

Step 3: Scenario-Based Playbooks

Your IR plan should include playbooks for the most likely attack scenarios for your business, for both internal incidents and product incidents. Each playbook should clearly define:

• Detection triggers (what event or alert starts the playbook)

• Immediate containment steps (limit spread, protect critical assets)

• Data to preserve (logs, forensic images, cloud snapshots)

• Recovery actions (return to operations without reintroducing risk)

• Who needs to be involved (vendors, executives, partners, etc)

Example playbooks that you should have:

User Space & Internal

• Phishing compromise - Phishing investigation | Microsoft Learn

• Endpoint malware infection

Cloud & Product

• Compromised cloud admin account - aws-incident-response-playbooks/playbooks/IRP-CredCompromise.md at master · aws-samples/aws-incident-response-playbooks · GitHub

• Exposed or vulnerable production resource

• Critical product bug or security flaw in active use by customers 

Step 4: Product Incident Response Readiness

For SMBs with customer-facing products or services, IR readiness must go beyond internal systems:

• Shutdown Capability: How quickly can you take the product offline or disable affected features?

• Patch/Change Rollout: How quickly can engineering push a fix or configuration change to production?

• Customer Notification: How will you communicate with customers e.g. direct email, in-product banners, status page updates?

• Regulatory Communication: Are there industry-specific disclosure requirements for security incidents?

Having these processes rehearsed ensures you’re not deciding them under pressure. 

Step 5: Pre-Configured Forensics and Recovery

If you wait until an incident to think about forensics, you’ll lose critical evidence. And in many cases, as a small business, you won’t be able to do this in house. You’ll need someone to call.

• Pre-stage collection scripts for endpoints (memory, logs) and cloud workloads (snapshotting, log export).

• Include production logging and audit trail export capabilities.

• Test backup restoration from clean, isolated systems—not from production where malware might still live.

• If you want to be able to hold anyone accountable that may need to be (critical third party vendors, outsourced tech support, etc) you will need to have an ability to collect evidence and properly manage it. 

• NOTE: you’re going to want to clearly define attorney client privilege with your attorneys and ensure its conveyed to your technical staff. Just copying an attorney on an email does not mean its privileged. Your chats, your emails, and your decisions can become part of a litigation after an incident.

Step 6: Test and Tune Regularly

Preparedness isn’t static. This is probably the single most important takeaway of this post.

• Run quarterly tabletop exercises for both technical staff and executives.

• Rotate through internal and product scenarios e.g. cloud, endpoint, insider threat, and production security flaws.

• Adjust based on lessons learned. 

Closing Thought

Technical IR preparedness for SMBs isn’t about building a massive SOC—it’s about having fast, clear, and tested steps for the incidents you’re most likely to face, across both your internal environment and your customer-facing product. The work you do now to build those playbooks, and to rehearse product shutdown, patching, and customer communications, will pay off in hours saved, trust preserved, and damage avoided when the real incident hits. You can also see direct savings in places like Cyber Insurance providers.

At CipherNorth, we can help you build these programs out based on your size and need. If you want to review what this may look like for your organization, setup a call today.

If you’re looking for a template to get started, we have an Incident Response Plan, Incident Report Template and a 1:1 Consultation to review your program with you available: Production Ready Templates — CipherNorth | Cybersecurity Consulting