How to use a cyber incident response plan template

Incident management isn’t easy. In fact, for most K-12 school districts, it’s an ongoing challenge.

Fortunately, you’re in luck: We’ve created a free-to-use cyber incident response plan template — made specifically for the K-12 school system.

This guide explains the importance of preparing for cyber threats and how you can best leverage our ready-to-go template. From start to finish, we’ll help you understand exactly what it takes to mitigate an attack every step of the way.

What is a cyber incident response plan template?

IBM defines the incident response process as an organization’s procedures for detecting and responding to cyber threats, such as a security breach, cyber attack, or insider leak. For K-12, the goal is to prevent cyber threats before they impact school districts, thereby minimizing the cost and disruption resulting from any that occur.

Incident response planning isn’t to be confused with disaster recovery planning. Although related, a disaster recovery plan is much more focused on the aftermath of an incident that physically damages the district, such as a natural disaster. By contrast, incident management is more closely related to information security (e.g. protecting sensitive data).

The power of preparation

An incident response plan (or IR plan for short) is a formal document specifying exactly how different cyber threats should be handled. Having an IR plan can help reduce the effects of a security incident and, in turn, limit operational, financial, and reputational damage.

Incident response planning establishes the appropriate workflow for mitigating risk, clearly defining each step in the cyber incident lifecycle. It also standardizes procedures needed to do the following:

• Recognize and contain a threat.
• Assess the incident quickly.
• Notify the appropriate individuals.
• Organize a coordinated response.
• Expedite recovery in the aftermath of the incident.

An effective cyber incident response plan is essential to K-12 data security. Not only can it help safeguard against attack, but it also helps restore affected systems faster, avoid regulatory fines, and dodge costs associated with breaches. In fact, according to IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach 2022 Report, organizations with incident response teams and regularly tested plans saved, on average, over $2.5 million in costs per security breach.

Why use a template?

An incident response plan template is a comprehensive checklist that describes the steps and actions required to detect a security incident, understand its impact, and control the damage. Templates provide a general framework that can be adapted to a specific organization.

There are many templates already available online, but none are tailored to the needs of a K-12 school district. That’s why we at ManagedMethods developed our own. Using our document can help you save scarce time and energy building an IR plan from scratch, allowing you to jumpstart incident management and better protect student data.

Let’s dive into the specifics of our incident response plan template and how each component works in detail.

Incident Response Team roles and responsibilities

The incident response team is one of the most important aspects of any IR plan. Ideally, the team should include cross-departmental stakeholders to ensure a district-wide cohesive approach throughout the incident response lifecycle

As outlined in the template, you should recruit and designate the following roles:

• Incident Response Team Lead: Coordinates and manages all incident handling activities.
• IT Security Officer: Performs all technical duties related to incident management, including investigation, containment, and recovery.
• Communications Officer: Keeps team members and the public informed, when appropriate, during a cyber incident.
• School Counselor: Addresses the emotional and psychological impact on students and staff.
• Legal Counsel: Provides guidance and ensures compliance with laws and regulations.
• IT service provider: Depending on your service agreement, a managed IT provider can assist with detection and response, log analysis, and so on.
• Digital Forensics Vendor: Provides, if necessary, specialized expertise on investigating and classifying the security incident.

Additionally, when creating an IR plan, you should discuss the roles that administrators, IT staff, teachers, and students/parents play in incident management. For instance, school leaders may be involved in reporting the incident to law enforcement. On the other hand, students and staff are in position to report suspected threats by contacting designated individuals.

Phases of the incident response lifecycle

The incident response process is typically broken down into four parts. As defined by the template, the IR plan must establish procedures at each step, including:

1. Preparation: This covers activities for proactively planning against and mitigating cyber threats before they occur. They include conducting risk assessments, identifying vulnerabilities, recruiting the response team, establishing communication channels, and so on. Districts must also implement security controls and monitoring systems to guard against suspicious activity, while backing up data to ensure it’s available for recovery.
2. Detection & Analysis: Monitoring tools should be scanning network traffic signs of a potential data breach. Once one is detected, the security team must investigate and analyze the event to determine its nature and severity.
3. Containment, Eradication, & Recovery: The immediate next step is to isolate compromised systems to prevent further damage. Team members must gather evidence and document the cyber incident to better understand it, allowing them to eradicate the root cause and bring resources back online. Lastly, the security team should test affected systems and verify they’re safe to resume normal operation.
4. Post-Incident Activities: There’s much to be learned from data breach or cyber attack. After mitigating the threat, the team must conduct a post-incident review and evaluate their performance. It’s best to document lessons learned and implement them into the IR plan for continuous improvement. These insights are valuable when it comes time to manage a future incident.

Incident classification and escalation

Organizations often make the mistake of treating every security breach the same. In reality, some are far worse than others, and should be managed as such. This is where classification comes into play.

Much like data classification, this is a key step in categorizing cyber threats based on their severity. In this case, severity is a measure of how damaging it would be if an attack compromised any given system. For example, severity levels might look like this:

• Low: Incidents with a minimal impact on systems or data.
• Medium: Incidents that warrant the attention of IT staff and impact multiple systems.
• High: A critical security incident that significantly damages compromised systems and the confidentiality of their data.

Keep in mind that sometimes an incident can start off as a low priority but evolve into something greater. That’s why your IR plan should also have escalation procedures that define criteria for reclassifying ongoing incidents. These ensure everyone stays on the same page and treats the event with the attention it deserves.

Creating a communication plan

Speaking of staying on the same page, communication is crucial to incident response. A lot can go wrong over the course of an evolving threat event, which means all internal team members have to know what’s happening in real time. This allows them to troubleshoot on the fly, coordinate responses, and minimize confusion.

What’s also important is to know when external stakeholders — regulatory agencies, parents, guardians, etc. — have to be informed. Remember, states have varying requirements when it comes to breach notification laws. Some also have much more rigorous data privacy regulations. Decide when exactly it’s appropriate to notify authorities and when it’s safe to wait.

Additionally, it’s best practice to maintain primary and secondary communication channels. Although uncommon, it’s possible that a cyber attack impacts primary channels and renders them useless.

Training and awareness programs

Digital literacy is a tentpole of the modern K-12 school system. That said, not everyone is up to date on the latest trends and best practices in the world of good cyber hygiene. According to a recent government report, many school security teams lack formal training.

So, your IR plan must include procedures for developing cybersecurity training and awareness programs — not only for students, but staff members and parents, too. Provide regular training sessions on basic password security, data protection, and the dangers of unsafe internet browsing. We recommend teaching students how to spot phishing scams, malware attacks, and other cyber threats so they can steer clear of digital harm on their own.

Incident management is a team effort. It requires all hands on deck to do their part and protect the school district from harm of any shape or kind.

Incident evaluation and continuous improvement

As previously mentioned, the last phase of the incident response process involves looking back at your performance. This helps you understand what worked, what didn’t, and what can be improved upon in the future.

Of course, this stage also depends on having actionable feedback in the first place. But where do you find it? Let’s take a look at a few ways you can gain valuable insight and improve the IR plan:

1. Engaging stakeholders: Conduct a post-incident interview with response team members. Ask them how they felt about the team’s performance and whether or not they mitigated the threat to the best of their ability. Aim to get to the bottom of any possible concerns and identify areas of improvement.
2. Enhancing collaboration: Involve staff members in the creation of the response plan early on in the process. Seek their input, suggestions, and feedback on how the plan defines critical procedures, roles and responsibilities, and so on. Encourage them to return with any additional insights they may think of at a later date.
3. Running simulations: Test out your IR plan and conduct a periodic exercise involving your response team. This can help you validate the plan, isolate gaps, and help team members understand their roles through hands-on experience.

Try our free cyber incident response plan template

Next time you find yourself chasing down a security breach, you’ll wish you had an effective IR plan on your side. So, why not get ahead of the curve and kickstart your incident response planning today?

With our cyber incident response plan template in hand, you’ll be able to streamline incident management, protect sensitive data, and foster a culture of continuous improvement.

Download the ManagedMethods Cyber Incident Response Plan Template to get started.