CodeRed Response Playbook: Steps for Incident Teams

CodeRed Response Playbook: Steps for Incident Teams—

Executive summary

CodeRed is a designation used here to represent a high‑severity cybersecurity incident — for example, a rapidly spreading worm, ransomware outbreak, or large‑scale compromise that threatens availability, integrity, or confidentiality across multiple systems. This playbook gives incident response (IR) teams a structured, practical, and prioritized set of steps to detect, contain, eradicate, recover, and learn from a CodeRed event. Use it as a template and adapt to your environment, compliance requirements, and internal roles.

1. Activation & initial triage

Assemble the incident response team (IRT) and notify stakeholders (CISO, legal, communications, IT ops).
Declare incident severity and escalation level based on impact (affected systems, data exfiltration indicators, business criticality). Declare CodeRed if the incident threatens multiple critical services or shows rapid lateral movement.
Triage incoming alerts and prioritize based on confidence and potential business impact. Capture timestamps, affected hosts, user accounts, and observable indicators of compromise (IoCs).

Key immediate actions:

Preserve evidence: enable packet capture where possible, snapshot VMs, and ensure secure logging.
Isolate suspected systems from the network (air‑gapped or VLAN segmented) to prevent spread, but don’t power off volatile systems unless absolutely necessary.
Start a secure, documented communication channel for the IRT (out‑of‑band chat, encrypted email, phone bridge).

2. Detection & investigation

Centralize telemetry: collect logs from endpoints, firewalls, IDS/IPS, proxy, EDR, SIEM, and cloud providers. Correlate by IOC (hashes, URLs, IPs, filenames) and tactics/techniques (MITRE ATT&CK mapping).
Hunt for lateral movement: examine authentication logs, service account behavior, and unusual SMB/RDP/SSH sessions. Identify initial access vector (phishing, vulnerable external service, supply chain).
Use memory forensics and EDR to detect in‑memory payloads, process injection, or kernel rootkits. If ransomware is suspected, look for file rename/encryption patterns and extortion notes.
Interview system owners and users for contextual clues (recent patches, unusual downloads, new remote access tools).

Deliverables from investigation:

Timeline of events.
Compromise scope (number of hosts, domains, cloud assets).
Confirmed IoCs and threat actor behavior profile.

3. Containment

Containment must balance stopping spread with preserving evidence and business continuity.

Short-term containment:

Block malicious IPs/URLs at the perimeter and in endpoint controls.
Disable compromised accounts and rotate credentials for service accounts.
Apply firewall rules or network segmentation to quarantine affected subnets.
Suspend automated processes that could propagate the threat (e.g., software deployment, unpopular scripts).

Long-term containment:

Patch exploitable services identified as the root cause.
Deploy endpoint detection tooling to remaining estate if coverage gaps exist.
Enforce MFA on all remote access and privileged accounts.

Document every containment action with timestamps and justification.

4. Eradication

Remove malware binaries, backdoors, and persistence mechanisms discovered during investigation.
Rebuild or reimage heavily compromised systems. For moderate compromise, perform in‑place remediation only after full confidence that backdoors are removed.
Clean credentials and rotate keys — both user and machine/service keys. Assume credentials are compromised.
Ensure all exploited vulnerabilities are patched and configuration weaknesses remediated (open shares, weak SMB settings, unnecessary RDP exposure).

Technical checklist:

Validate removal using EDR scans and offline/manual checks (hash comparison to trusted images).
Reset domain controllers or restore from verified backups if DC compromise occurred.
Revoke and reissue certificates if they may have been exposed.

5. Recovery

Gradually restore systems to production following a prioritized plan (critical services first). Use canary hosts to validate stability.
Restore data from verified clean backups. Verify integrity and completeness before reconnecting to the network.
Monitor restored systems closely for recurrence of suspicious activity (increased logging, network anomalies).
Communicate carefully: provide internal stakeholders with status updates and external communications teams with approved messaging for customers or regulators.

Recovery milestones:

Business services restored to acceptable level of operation.
No indicators of active compromise in restored systems for a defined observation window (often 7–14 days, adjustable by risk profile).
Signed acceptance from business owners to resume normal operations.

6. Post‑incident activities & lessons learned

Conduct a formal post‑mortem with technical and business stakeholders. Produce an after‑action report covering root cause, timeline, impact, remediation steps, and residual risk.
Update playbooks, runbooks, and detection signatures based on new IoCs and tactics discovered.
Perform a tabletop exercise within 30–60 days to validate changes and team readiness.
Identify gaps in tooling, coverage, or process and prioritize investments (EDR rollout, SIEM tuning, staff training).

Suggested remediation items:

Harden configurations (disable unnecessary services, least privilege).
Improve monitoring (additional log sources, anomaly detection).
Revisit backup and disaster recovery plans; test backups regularly.

7. Legal, compliance & communication

Engage legal and compliance early to determine notification obligations (regulatory breach notifications, data subject notices).
Preserve chain of custody for evidence if law enforcement may be involved.
Craft external communications that balance transparency and operational security; avoid disclosing detailed technical findings that could enable copycats.
Coordinate with PR for customer-facing messaging and with HR for internal personnel matters.

Share sanitized IoCs and tactics with trusted information sharing organizations (ISACs, CERTs) to help peers defend.
Subscribe to threat feeds and update signature‑based controls and hunting queries with newly discovered IoCs.
If attribution is relevant and permitted, document threat actor behavior and likely motivation to inform longer‑term defensive posture.

9. Runbook snippets (quick reference)

Network isolation: apply ACLs to block ports 445, 3389, and known malicious IPs; quarantine VLAN for affected hosts.
Credential compromise: disable accounts, expire passwords, enforce MFA, revoke sessions/tokens.
Ransomware: isolate, preserve backups, contact legal/insurer, do not pay without executive legal advice.

10. Metrics & KPIs for CodeRed readiness

Mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to respond (MTTR) targets.
Percentage of endpoints with EDR coverage.
Patch latency for critical vulnerabilities.
Time to restore core business services post‑incident.

Appendix — Tools & resources

Forensic: Volatility, Rekall, FTK Imager.
EDR/Detection: (examples) CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft Defender.
Network: Zeek, Suricata, tcpdump.
Backup & recovery: periodic offline/immutable backups, verified restoration playbooks.

This playbook is a starting point. Adjust roles, communication paths, legal needs, and technical steps to match your organization’s size, industry, and risk tolerance.

CodeRed Response Playbook: Steps for Incident Teams