### Step 3: Containment

The goal of containment is to limit damage from the current security incident and prevent any further damage. Several steps are necessary to completely mitigate the incident, while also preventing destruction of evidence that may be needed for prosecution.

The SANS containment process involves:

-   **Short-term containment**—limiting damage before the incident gets worse, usually by isolating network segments, taking down hacked production server and routing to failover.
-   **System backup**—taking a forensic image of the affected system(s) with tools such as Forensic Tool Kit (FTK) or EnCase, and only then wipe and reimage the systems. This will preserve evidence from the attack that can be used in court, and also for further investigation of the incident and lessons learned.
-   **Long-term containment**—applying temporarily fixes to make it possible to bring production systems back up. The primary focus is removing accounts or backdoors left by attackers on the systems, and addressing the root cause—for example, fixing a broken authentication mechanism or patching a vulnerability that led to the attack.