Overview

Post-incident review captures lessons learned and drives continuous improvement of security controls and incident response capabilities.

Review Process

Timeline

Activity	Timing
Initial debrief	Within 24 hours
Root cause analysis	Within 1 week
Written report	Within 2 weeks
Improvement implementation	Within 30 days
Follow-up review	90 days

Participants

• Incident Commander
• Security analysts involved
• Operations team
• Product/Engineering (if code changes needed)
• Management (for high-severity)

Post-Incident Report Template

# Post-Incident Review Report

## Incident Summary
- **ID**: INC-2026-001
- **Date**: 2026-01-15
- **Severity**: High
- **Duration**: 2 hours 15 minutes
- **Status**: Resolved

## Timeline
| Time | Event |
|------|-------|
| 10:00 | Alert triggered |
| 10:05 | Analyst begins investigation |
| 10:15 | Incident confirmed, escalated |
| 10:30 | Containment actions taken |
| 11:00 | Root cause identified |
| 12:15 | Recovery complete |

## Impact
- Sessions affected: 5
- Data potentially exposed: None confirmed
- Service disruption: 45 minutes

## Root Cause
[Description of root cause]

## What Went Well
1. Detection was rapid (5 minutes)
2. Containment was effective
3. Communication was clear

## What Could Be Improved
1. Playbook didn't cover this scenario
2. Recovery took longer than target
3. Some logs were incomplete

## Action Items
| Action | Owner | Due | Status |
|--------|-------|-----|--------|
| Update playbook | Security | 2026-01-30 | Open |
| Add monitoring | Ops | 2026-02-01 | Open |
| Fix logging gap | Dev | 2026-01-25 | In Progress |

## Control Improvements
- [ ] Add detection for [specific pattern]
- [ ] Strengthen control [ID]
- [ ] Update policy [name]

Metrics to Track

Metric	Target	Actual
Mean Time to Detect	< 15 min
Mean Time to Contain	< 30 min
Mean Time to Recover	< 4 hours
Playbook Coverage	100%
Action Item Completion	100% in 30 days

Continuous Improvement

Quarterly Review

• Review all incidents from quarter
• Identify trends and patterns
• Update threat model if needed
• Assess control effectiveness
• Plan improvements

Annual Assessment

• Full incident response exercise
• Tabletop exercises for new scenarios
• Third-party assessment of IR capability
• Program maturity evaluation