Define incident response playbooks

Define, document, and test IR plans

The first step on incident response is to think on what are all the circunstances that are not desirable and define what is the action plan in case that occurs.

For instance, when there’s a new Amazon GuardDuty finding that is reporting bitcoin mining or outgoing connections to malicious command and control IP addresses from Amazon EC2 instances, you could define as action plan to change the security groups setting one that does not allow outgoing connections, and only allows incomming connections for remote access (SSH/RDP) from an IP address of the workstation used by the incident forensics team.

It’s recommended to establish those scenarios where actions should be taken, document it in playbooks.

Having a documented plan helps with consistency and scale, as when the most senior security resource is not available (i.e.: if she/he’s on vacations), if the plan is documented junior personnel can respond in a similar way, following the instructions of the most qualified resource.

Whitepaper: AWS Security Incident Response Guide

https://d1.awsstatic.com/whitepapers/aws_security_incident_response.pdf

Playbook Samples

https://github.com/aws-samples/aws-customer-playbook-framework