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Part 7: Incident Response & Forensics

In one line: Once something has happened, you need a disciplined process to contain it, figure out exactly what occurred, preserve evidence correctly, and decide whether it's a reportable breach — this chapter is that process, going well beyond the "roll it back" mitigation covered in ops to true investigation.

In plain English

A detection fired — now what? Incident response is the calm, rehearsed procedure for the worst day: contain the damage, investigate what actually happened (which systems, which data, how they got in, how long they were there), and preserve evidence so the answers hold up — including legally. Forensics is the investigative craft: reading disk and memory images, network captures, and logs to reconstruct a timeline. And breach determination is the high-stakes call of whether regulators and customers must be notified. This is distinct from operational incident response (restore service); here the goal is truth and evidence, not just uptime.

What this chapter covers​

  • The IR lifecycle — prepare, detect, contain, eradicate, recover, learn.
  • Tabletop exercises & BC/DR — rehearsing the plan, and the backups/RTO/RPO that make recovery real.
  • Chain of custody & evidence preservation — handling artifacts so they remain trustworthy (and admissible).
  • Forensic artifacts — disk, memory, and network forensics; what each reveals.
  • Timeline reconstruction — assembling the "what happened, in what order" story.
  • Breach determination & notification — confirmed vs suspected, and the regulatory clock (ties to Compliance).

The lessons in this chapter​

  1. The IR Lifecycle → — prepare, identify, contain, eradicate, recover, learn — and why the bookends decide the outcome.
  2. Tabletop Exercises & Business Continuity (BC/DR) → — runbooks/playbooks, running a tabletop, and BIA/RTO/RPO/backups that make the prepare and recover phases real.
  3. Chain of Custody & Evidence Preservation → — order of volatility, forensic imaging, write blockers, hashing, and the unbroken paper trail.
  4. Forensic Artifacts → — disk, memory, and network forensics, and what each reveals (and misses).
  5. Timeline Reconstruction → — correlating artifacts into one ordered story, and the timestamp traps.
  6. Breach Determination & Notification → — incident vs. breach, the evidence required, the regulatory clock, and why honesty wins.

Finish with the Chapter 7 checkpoint → to certify the toolkit before Chapter 8.

→ Start here: The IR Lifecycle.