Communicating Incident Response: A Reporting Framework for the C-Suite

Background: Incident response is divided into two parts: hands-on activities and management activities. We have discussed hands-on activities extensively. However, if we want to present the activity timeline—including all its components—to the C-suite team, it should be structured in a way that enables effective decision-making and facilitates lessons learned.

Chapter 1 Incident metadata: It should contain information about the incident, including the incident name, by whom it created, incident severity, and incident commander name,and the incident document version .

Chapter 2 Incident legal information: It should contain information from the legal team describing the process of document ownership changes and related procedures.

Chapter 3 Executive summary: Include a brief incident description and a high-level overview of related details.

Chapter 3 Incident timeline: Describe the actions taken by the Incident Response (IR) team, the decision-making team, and the threat actor during the incident.

Chapter 4 Impacted Systems: Describe the list of impacted and non impacted assets

Chapter 5 Stakeholders: Describes the stakeholders lists and systems owners

Chapter 6 Legal and Compliance: Should be filled by legal team related to legal consequences

Chapter 7 Action Items and Tasks: Describes the the tasks which need to be done during the incident

Chapter 8 Evidences and Findings: Describe the finding related to incident

Chapter 9 Root cause: Describes root of cause of the incident

Chapter 10 Lesson learn: Describe lesson learn

Chapter 11 Conclusion: Describe conclusion related to noted incident .

Conclusion: The template should always be delivered to the C-suite as a post-mortem report to help the organization avoid legal and other issues in daily operations.