What are the steps of the incident response process?

The NIST incident response process has four phases. Preparation establishes the incident response team, policies, communication plans, and tools before an incident occurs. Detection and analysis uses monitoring, logging, and alerts to identify incidents and determine their scope, impact, and severity. Containment, eradication, and recovery isolates affected systems to stop the spread, removes the threat, restores operations from clean states, and validates that systems are functioning normally.