Clerk.io

Information Security Incident Response Procedure

1. Purpose

Provide a structured approach for detecting, responding to and recovering from security incidents.

2. Scope

Applies to all information systems, personnel and third parties.

3. Definitions

4. Roles

Role Duty
Incident Commander Coordinates response; usually ISM or delegate
Communications Lead Handles internal/external comms; works with Marketing & Legal
Technical Lead Performs investigation & remediation
Scribe Maintains timeline & evidence

5. Phases

  1. Preparation – Training, runbooks, tooling (Better Stack, SIEM).
  2. Identification – Alerts from SIEM, customer report, anomaly detection.
  3. Containment – Short-term (isolate systems), long-term (patch, reimage).
  4. Eradication – Remove root cause (malware, vuln).
  5. Recovery – Restore services, monitor for re-occurrence.
  6. Lessons Learned – Post-mortem within 5 business days.

6. Severity Matrix

Sev Criteria Response Time
1 – Critical Data breach, widespread outage ≤ 15 min
2 – High Limited customer impact ≤ 30 min
3 – Medium Internal system issue ≤ 4 h
4 – Low No immediate impact 24 h

7. Notification Obligations

8. Evidence Handling

Follow chain-of-custody; logs exported to write-once storage; hash verified.

9. Post-Incident Review

Root-cause analysis (RCA) meeting produces corrective actions logged in Jira; track to closure.

10. Testing

Conduct at least 6 tabletop exercises per year (bi-monthly); critical runbooks tested bi-monthly.


Version 1.0 — effective 2025-07-01