Creating and maintaining an incident response playbook can significantly improve the speed and effectiveness of your organization’s incident response. Even better, it does not require a lot of extra time and effort to build a playbook.
To help, here’s a look at what incident response playbooks accomplish, why they are important and how to use them.
What is an incident response playbook, and why is it important?
An incident response playbook defines common processes or step-by-step procedures for an organization’s response to a cybersecurity incident in an easy-to-use format. Playbooks are designed to be actionable, meaning they quickly tell incident response team members the specific actions they should take under particular circumstances. For example, a playbook might have plays for formally declaring an incident, collecting and safeguarding digital evidence, eradicating ransomware or other malware, and coordinating a data breach announcement with the PR team.
Every minute counts in incident response. A playbook provides a single, authoritative, up-to-date source of instructions for all personnel with incident response roles and responsibilities. Everyone should know where to find the latest information.
How to create an incident response playbook
The following key steps are involved in building an effective incident response playbook.
Step 1. Consider using existing playbooks and frameworks
Review publicly available incident response playbooks to see which activities they document, the level of detail they provide on each activity and how they organize the sets of activities. Many organizations use playbooks that follow the phases of Revision 2 of the NIST incident response framework: preparation; detection and analysis; containment, eradication and recovery; and post-incident activity.
Some organizations base their playbooks on the latest NIST incident response and recommendations, which describe an incident response lifecycle with three stages:
- Detect, respond and recover.
- Govern, identify and protect.
- Identify improvements.
This model provides full alignment with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 and the resources based on CSF 2.0.
Step 2. Assess and update existing incident response programs
Gather existing policies, procedures and other documentation related to incident response activities. Assess them for completeness, accuracy and usability.
Step 3. Write well-organized playbooks
Properly plan the contents of the playbook, including its structure and organization. This is a balancing act. The more detailed the plays are — and the more comprehensive the playbook is — the more effort it takes to create and maintain. But the effort could save time for incident responders and improve the quality of their response activities. One method for building a playbook is to list potential response actions to a particular incident and their correlating processes and procedures.
Step 4. Make playbooks user-friendly
Ensure incident response playbooks are clear, concise and easy to read and use. Once an organization’s specific playbook needs are identified, write simple steps for users to follow. If steps are unclear or complicated, team members could struggle to complete their necessary tasks during an incident. This will lead to delays.
Step 5. Update playbooks and plans
Conduct post-incident analysis and feedback to review how well a playbook worked against a real and unscripted incident. Gather feedback from everyone who used the playbook to determine how well it informed them of the various steps to take, and if anything proved confusing or unwieldy. Once feedback is collected, review it against existing playbooks and make any necessary changes or updates.
Types of incident response playbooks
It’s impossible for organizations to develop step-by-step instructions for every possible security incident they might encounter. NIST provides several examples of incidents based on common attack vectors to use as a basis for defining specific handling procedures.
Examples of incidents include an attacker doing one of the following:
- Issuing a DDoS attack against one of the organization’s public-facing services.
- Stealing administrative credentials from a service provider the organization relies on or compromising software that the organization uses.
- Stealing organizational credentials for a company’s industrial control systems and commanding those systems to shut down.
- Infecting devices with ransomware.
- Sending phishing emails to gain unauthorized access to user accounts and perform fraud using those accounts.
The benefits of incident response playbooks
The advantages of creating and having playbooks for incident response include the following:
- Incident response activities are consistent throughout the organization, and staff are less likely to skip steps within processes and procedures.
- Responses likely will start sooner and be performed more quickly when there’s a playbook to follow. This reduces the duration of incidents and the damage they might cause. An organization’s normal operations should resume sooner.
- The playbook effectively provides a common language for all incident response personnel to speak. It saves time and improves results, for example, by pointing someone to a particular play rather than trying to explain what it is they need to do.
Incident response playbook use cases
Incident response playbooks aren’t just valuable for responding to actual incidents. For example, playbooks are excellent assets for getting new staff up to speed on how an organization conducts incident response activities. They’re also useful for incident response exercises and tests. In an incident response tabletop exercise, participants can reference particular plays to indicate how they would act in a real situation. In a test, participants’ actions can be compared to what the playbook specified.
Incident response playbook templates and examples
An incident response playbook outlines the steps an organization needs to follow to respond to data security incidents.
The following playbook templates serve as useful starting points to help incident response teams develop plans customized to their organization’s needs:
Gather feedback from the people who will be using playbooks — it will be invaluable. After all, a playbook that’s difficult to use could be more of a hindrance than a help.
Editor’s note: This article was updated in 2026 with additional information.
Karen Kent is the co-founder of Trusted Cyber Annex. She provides cybersecurity research and publication services to organizations and was formerly a senior computer scientist for NIST.
