In this chapter, you learned about the incident response process, and how this fits into the overall purpose of enhancing your security posture. You also learned about the importance of having an incident response in place to rapidly identify and respond to security incidents. By planning each phase of the incident response life cycle, you create a cohesive process that can be applied to the entire organization. The foundation of the incident response plan is the same for different industries, and on top of this foundation you can include the customized areas that are relevant to your own business. You also came across the key aspects of handling an incident, and the importance of post-incident activity—which includes a full documentation of lessons learned—and using this information as input to improve the overall process. Lastly, you learned the basics of incident response in the cloud and how this can affect your current process.

In the next chapter, you will understand the mindset of an attacker, the different stages of an attack, and what usually takes place in each one of these phases. This is an important concept for the rest of the book, considering that the attack and defense exercises will be using the cybersecurity kill chain as a foundation.