How do you balance speed and accuracy during incident triage?

1 Define your criteria

Before you start triaging, you need to have a clear and consistent set of criteria to evaluate the incidents. These criteria should align with your organization's policies, objectives, and risk appetite, and reflect the potential damage, urgency, and complexity of the incidents. You should also prioritize the criteria based on their importance and relevance to your context. For example, you may consider factors such as data sensitivity, threat actor, attack vector, incident type, affected systems, business impact, regulatory compliance, and stakeholder involvement.

2 Use a standardized process

Having a standardized process for incident triage can help you streamline your workflow, reduce human errors, and ensure consistency and quality. You should follow a documented and approved procedure that defines the roles, responsibilities, and expectations of the incident response team, as well as the tools, methods, and sources of information to use. You should also use a common terminology and reporting format to communicate your findings and recommendations. A standardized process can also help you automate or delegate some tasks, such as data collection, analysis, and classification, to save time and resources.

3 Validate your assumptions

One of the challenges of incident triage is dealing with uncertainty and ambiguity. You may not have all the information you need, or you may encounter conflicting or misleading data. To avoid jumping to conclusions or making false assumptions, you should always validate your findings and hypotheses with multiple sources of evidence, such as logs, alerts, network traffic, forensic artifacts, threat intelligence, and external reports. You should also cross-check your results with your peers or experts, and document your reasoning and assumptions for future reference.

4 Adjust your scope

Another challenge of incident triage is defining the scope of the incident, which may change over time as new information emerges or the situation evolves. You should be flexible and adaptable to adjust your scope according to the available data, the incident criteria, and the organizational needs. You should also be aware of the trade-offs between expanding or narrowing your scope, such as the impact on the resources, time, and accuracy of the triage. For example, expanding your scope may help you identify more indicators of compromise or affected systems, but it may also increase the complexity and cost of the triage.

5 Review your decisions

Once you have completed your incident triage, you should review your decisions and actions to ensure that they are accurate, consistent, and justified. You should also verify that you have met the expectations and requirements of your organization and stakeholders, and that you have communicated your findings and recommendations clearly and effectively. You should also document your lessons learned and best practices, and update your incident triage process and criteria accordingly. Reviewing your decisions can help you improve your incident triage skills and performance, and prepare you for future incidents.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?