Corporate Incident Handling Guidelines

Incidents are an unfortunate fact of life in any systems environment. They can be extremely visible and disruptive (e.g.: widespread virus outbreaks) or entirely unnoticed but extremely damaging (e.g.: loss of confidential growth plans). There is a vast amount of information available to help you deal with most types, but if you have done no preparation you will struggle to find it when you need it at short notice. Incidents are also likely to occur at the least convenient time when the right people are not available. If you are a large multinational corporation without a large security function, this paper will help you approach some of the common problems in preparing incident handling procedures.