IR-4: Incident Handling

Control Family:

Incident Response

PF v1.0 References:

Baselines:

Previous Version:

Control Statement

  1. Implement an incident handling capability for incidents that is consistent with the incident response plan and includes preparation, detection and analysis, containment, eradication, and recovery;
  2. Coordinate incident handling activities with contingency planning activities;
  3. Incorporate lessons learned from ongoing incident handling activities into incident response procedures, training, and testing, and implement the resulting changes accordingly; and
  4. Ensure the rigor, intensity, scope, and results of incident handling activities are comparable and predictable across the organization.

Supplemental Guidance

Organizations recognize that incident response capabilities are dependent on the capabilities of organizational systems and the mission and business processes being supported by those systems. Organizations consider incident response as part of the definition, design, and development of mission and business processes and systems. Incident-related information can be obtained from a variety of sources, including audit monitoring, physical access monitoring, and network monitoring; user or administrator reports; and reported supply chain events. An effective incident handling capability includes coordination among many organizational entities (e.g., mission or business owners, system owners, authorizing officials, human resources offices, physical security offices, personnel security offices, legal departments, risk executive [function], operations personnel, procurement offices). Suspected security incidents include the receipt of suspicious email communications that can contain malicious code. Suspected supply chain incidents include the insertion of counterfeit hardware or malicious code into organizational systems or system components. For federal agencies, an incident that involves personally identifiable information is considered a breach. A breach results in unauthorized disclosure, the loss of control, unauthorized acquisition, compromise, or a similar occurrence where a person other than an authorized user accesses or potentially accesses personally identifiable information or an authorized user accesses or potentially accesses such information for other than authorized purposes.

Control Enhancements

IR-4(2): Dynamic Reconfiguration

Baseline(s):

(Not part of any baseline)

Include the following types of dynamic reconfiguration for [Assignment: organization-defined system components] as part of the incident response capability: [Assignment: organization-defined types of dynamic reconfiguration].

IR-4(3): Continuity of Operations

Baseline(s):

(Not part of any baseline)

Identify [Assignment: organization-defined classes of incidents] and take the following actions in response to those incidents to ensure continuation of organizational mission and business functions: [Assignment: organization-defined actions to take in response to classes of incidents].

IR-4(4): Information Correlation

Baseline(s):

  • High

Correlate incident information and individual incident responses to achieve an organization-wide perspective on incident awareness and response.

IR-4(5): Automatic Disabling of System

Baseline(s):

(Not part of any baseline)

Implement a configurable capability to automatically disable the system if [Assignment: organization-defined security violations] are detected.

IR-4(6): Insider Threats

Baseline(s):

(Not part of any baseline)

Implement an incident handling capability for incidents involving insider threats.

IR-4(8): Correlation with External Organizations

Baseline(s):

(Not part of any baseline)

Coordinate with [Assignment: organization-defined external organizations] to correlate and share [Assignment: organization-defined incident information] to achieve a cross-organization perspective on incident awareness and more effective incident responses.

IR-4(10): Supply Chain Coordination

Baseline(s):

(Not part of any baseline)

Coordinate incident handling activities involving supply chain events with other organizations involved in the supply chain.

IR-4(11): Integrated Incident Response Team

Baseline(s):

  • High

Establish and maintain an integrated incident response team that can be deployed to any location identified by the organization in [Assignment: organization-defined time period].

IR-4(13): Behavior Analysis

Baseline(s):

(Not part of any baseline)

Analyze anomalous or suspected adversarial behavior in or related to [Assignment: organization-defined environments or resources].