### Step 1: Preparation

The goal of the preparation stage is to ensure that the organization can comprehensively respond to an incident at a moment’s notice.

In a SANS incident response plan, these are critical elements that should be prepared in advance:

-   **Policy**—define principle, rules and practices to guide security processes. Ensure the policy is highly visible both to employees and users, for example by displaying a login banner that states all activities will be monitored, and clearly stating unauthorized activities and the associated penalties.
-   **Response Plan/Strategy**—create a plan for incident handling, with prioritization of incidents based on organizational impact. For example, organizational impact is higher the more employees are affected within the organization, the more an event is likely to impact revenues, or the more sensitive data is involved, such as salaries, financial or private customer data.
-   **Communication**—create a communication plan that states which CSIRT members should be contacted during an incident, for what reasons and when they can be contacted. For example, there may be operations staff on call at all hours, everyone in the organization should know, which incident responders to contact to help bring systems back up. The communication plan should state the policy for contacting law enforcement, and who should make contact.
-   **Documentation**—documentation is not optional and can be a life saver. If the incident is considered a criminal act, your documentation will be used to press charges against suspects. Any information you collect about the incident can also be used for lessons learned and to improve your incident response process. Documentation should answer the questions: Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How?.
-   **Team**—build a CSIRT team with all relevant skills, not just security. Include individuals with expertise in security but also IT operations, legal, human resources, and public relations—all of whom can be instrumental in dealing with and mitigating an attack.
-   **Access control**—make sure that CSIRT staff have the appropriate permissions to do their job. It is a good idea to have, as part of the incident response plan, network administrators add permissions to CSIRT member accounts, and then remove them when the incident is over.
-   **Training**—ensure initial and ongoing training for all CSIRT members on incident response processes, technical skills and relevant cyberattack patterns and techniques. Carry out drills at regular intervals to insure that everyone in the CSIRT knows what they need to do and is able to perform their duties during a real incident.
-   **Tools**—evaluate, select and deploy software and hardware that can help respond to an incident more effectively. All of the tools should be packaged in a “jump bag” that can be quickly accessed by CSIRT members when an incident occurs.