Building Incident Response Playbooks

When to Use

• Establishing or maturing an incident response program from scratch
• Documenting procedures for a new incident type after a novel attack
• Automating response workflows in a SOAR platform (Cortex XSOAR, Splunk SOAR)
• Preparing for compliance audits requiring documented IR procedures (SOC 2, PCI-DSS, HIPAA)
• Conducting a gap analysis of existing IR capabilities against specific threat scenarios

Do not use for one-time ad hoc investigations; playbooks are reusable procedure documents, not case-specific reports.

Prerequisites

• Organizational risk assessment identifying top incident scenarios by likelihood and impact
• NIST SP 800-61r3 or SANS PICERL framework adopted as the organizational IR standard
• Asset inventory with business criticality ratings and data classification
• RACI chart defining roles: Incident Commander, SOC analysts, system administrators, legal, communications
• Existing detection capabilities inventory (SIEM rules, EDR detections, IDS signatures)