A suspected state-sponsored intrusion should start a documented incident process—not a public attribution. Your checklist should assign authority, preserve evidence before it is changed, determine the full scope (including identity systems and backups), contain the activity without creating unacceptable operational risk, meet reporting duties, and verify that persistence is gone before recovery. Treat “state-sponsored” as a working hypothesis until technical and contextual evidence supports a conclusion.
What the checklist must accomplish
Use the checklist as a living response document. Every item needs an owner, status, time, and decision record. Keep three labels separate throughout the incident:
- Suspected: an observation or report has raised concern.
- Verified: evidence confirms unauthorized activity or compromise.
- Attributed: technical and contextual analysis supports a particular actor or state.
Do not advance an incident from suspected to attributed merely because an IP address, malware family, tool, or technique resembles one associated with a government-backed group. Those indicators can be reused, copied, or deliberately planted.
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1. Trigger the response and establish control
The first hour is about creating a reliable command structure and preventing uncoordinated changes. Record the initial facts without trying to solve attribution.
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Open the incident record
- Record who reported the activity, the reporting time and time zone, affected users or systems, and the original observations.
- Assign a unique incident identifier and an incident coordination lead.
- Write the initial confidence level: suspected, verified, or attributed, with a short reason.
- Start a UTC-based timeline. For every consequential action, capture the time, person, action, reason, expected effect, and result.
- List known unknowns rather than filling gaps with assumptions.
Assign decision authority
Name the person who can authorize isolation, credential resets, service shutdowns, emergency changes, and business-continuity measures. Confirm a deputy for nights, weekends, and handoffs. Identify the system owners who understand the affected services and the operations leaders who can judge safety and availability consequences.
Notify the response group
Use the organization’s incident plan to notify, as applicable:
- Executive leadership and the incident coordination lead.
- Security operations, IT operations, identity administrators, and system owners.
- Legal counsel, privacy, compliance, and insurance contacts.
- Communications or public-affairs staff.
- Business-continuity, risk, safety, and operational-technology personnel.
Use an out-of-band channel if the normal email, collaboration, or identity infrastructure could be compromised. Record who was notified, when, by which channel, and what response or approval is required.
Make the first triage decision
Classify urgency using observable impact: active attacker access, privileged-account compromise, destructive or disruptive behavior, exposure of regulated data, safety implications, or risk to critical services. A high-urgency classification should accelerate containment and evidence capture; it should not lower the standard for documenting decisions.
2. Contain the intrusion without losing evidence or safety
Containment limits further access, but a rushed action can destroy volatile evidence or interrupt a critical process. CISA state-sponsored-threat guidance recommends immediately isolating affected systems, securing backups, and reviewing relevant logs and artifacts. There is no single isolation procedure that is safe for every environment.
Choose an isolation action
- Identify the suspected host, account, cloud workload, network segment, or service and the access the actor may still have.
- Estimate the operational effect of each option: network quarantine, host shutdown, account disablement, token revocation, application removal, firewall block, or service isolation.
- Ask the responder or forensic lead whether memory, process state, or other volatile data must be captured first.
- Obtain the accountable owner’s approval unless an emergency rule in the incident plan permits immediate action.
- Apply the least disruptive effective control, record exceptions, and define how it can be reversed.
- Verify that the control worked by checking logs, sessions, routes, and authentication activity.
When active harm or continued privileged access creates greater risk than evidence loss, isolate first and document why. When feasible, capture volatile data before shutdown or remediation. A CISA advisory recommends collecting logs, memory, and forensic images before mitigations such as patching.
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Protect backups and recovery infrastructure
Assume backup systems, management consoles, hypervisors, storage, and recovery credentials may be within scope until checked. Restrict unauthorized access, preserve relevant backup logs, and verify that recovery copies are isolated or otherwise protected from the suspected actor. Do not restore from a backup simply because it is available; establish that it predates compromise and has not been altered.
Handle OT and safety-sensitive systems differently
For industrial control, medical, laboratory, building, transport, or other safety-sensitive environments, security isolation must be coordinated with operations and safety personnel. Confirm how the process will run if remote access, supervisory control, or network connectivity is lost. CISA advises maintaining an OT resilience plan that addresses loss of access to or control of IT or OT environments. If a security action could create a physical hazard, use the approved safe-state and continuity procedure rather than an IT-only shutdown.
Use outside expertise when capacity is missing
Consider an external incident-response or digital-forensics team when the suspected scope exceeds in-house expertise, privileged access is involved, evidence handling may be challenged, the attacker remains active, or internal responders are themselves affected. Choose based on forensic capability, independence, availability, confidentiality arrangements, and experience with your technology and regulatory obligations—not on a generic provider ranking. Legal counsel should help define engagement and evidence-handling terms.
3. Preserve evidence and maintain chain of custody
Evidence supports verification, scoping, prioritization, mitigation, reporting, and any later legal or disciplinary process. CISA’s checklist states: “Collect and preserve data for incident verification, categorization, prioritization, mitigation, reporting, attribution, and as potential evidence in accordance with NIST 800-61r2.” The CISA playbook also instructs responders to log how and when evidence was acquired and who acquired it.
Collect the sources most likely to answer the first questions
- Endpoint security, operating-system, process, persistence, and authentication logs.
- Identity-provider, directory, privileged-access, and remote-access records.
- Internal network, DNS, firewall, proxy, VPN, and segmentation logs.
- Cloud control-plane, workload, storage, and API audit records.
- Application, transaction, intrusion-detection, connection, system-performance, and user-activity logs.
- Relevant email, collaboration, ticketing, and administrator records.
- Memory captures and forensic disk images when justified and possible.
Record acquisition details
For every item, record the source system and time range, collector, acquisition method and tool version where relevant, hash or integrity value if used, original location, evidence-copy location, transfer history, and every person who accessed it. Preserve originals under your evidence policy and analyze working copies. Synchronize clocks or document clock differences so events can be correlated accurately.
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Coordinate before altering systems
Do not patch, reimage, delete accounts, rotate secrets, or run cleanup tools blindly. Coordinate with the incident lead, forensic specialists, and legal counsel where appropriate. Some actions are necessary to stop harm, but record what changed, what evidence may have been lost, and why the action was authorized.
4. Determine scope and investigate persistence
Scope is more than a list of infected laptops. Establish how access began, what the actor could reach, what they did, and whether a route back remains.
Build a scope matrix
| Question | What to document |
|---|---|
| Initial access | Known or suspected entry point, time window, exploited service, stolen credential, phishing path, or supply-chain connection. |
| Systems and accounts | Affected hosts, cloud workloads, applications, identities, service accounts, domain controllers, management planes, and third parties. |
| Privilege | Accounts or tokens used, privilege gained, escalation path, administrative actions, and credentials that may need rotation. |
| Lateral movement | Remote services, shared credentials, administrative tools, network paths, and adjacent systems contacted. |
| Data and operations | Data viewed, copied, changed, or destroyed; service interruption; safety effect; contractual or regulatory exposure. |
| Persistence | Scheduled tasks, services, startup items, web shells, cloud identities, OAuth grants, access keys, modified policies, and other mechanisms that survive cleanup. |
| Confidence | Confirmed facts, plausible hypotheses, contradictory evidence, and unresolved questions for each finding. |
Investigate connected systems
Review endpoint, identity, network, firewall, proxy, cloud, and remote-access records across the full suspected time window. Check domain controllers, identity infrastructure, backup systems, virtualization management, security tools, and service-provider connections. A CISA advisory concerning Iranian government-sponsored activity urges organizations that detect suspected initial access or compromise to assume lateral movement and investigate connected systems and the domain controller. Apply that as threat-specific guidance for matching circumstances, not as proof of attribution or a universal rule.
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Set a review cadence and update the matrix whenever a new host, account, technique, or data path is found. Mark each entry as confirmed, likely, possible, disproven, or unknown. Preserve earlier versions so the record shows how decisions changed as evidence improved.
5. Analyze the activity without premature attribution
Analysis should explain what happened and how confident you are, while keeping attribution provisional.
Correlate and test alternatives
- Build a timeline from independent sources and account for clock skew.
- Compare suspicious actions with authorized maintenance, automation, and administrator behavior.
- Correlate identity, endpoint, network, cloud, and application evidence rather than relying on one indicator.
- Test whether credentials, infrastructure, malware, or techniques could have been reused or spoofed by another actor.
- Document hypotheses, the evidence supporting each, disconfirming evidence, and the next test.
Use advisories as hunting guides
Current official advisories can suggest indicators, tactics, techniques, and connected systems to examine. Record the advisory version or publication date used, the exact indicator or behavior matched, and what independent evidence confirms compromise. An indicator match is a reason to investigate—not a standalone attribution finding.
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Set an attribution threshold
Before naming a state or group internally or externally, require corroboration across technical and contextual evidence, such as infrastructure relationships, tradecraft patterns, victimology, timing, access objectives, and reliable intelligence. State the confidence level and alternatives. If the evidence supports only “suspected state-sponsored activity,” use that wording.
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Reporting duties depend on jurisdiction, sector, contracts, data types, insurance terms, and the organization’s role. Legal counsel and compliance owners should map mandatory deadlines and recipients before anyone sends sensitive details.
Identify mandatory notifications
- List applicable cyber-incident, privacy, critical-infrastructure, financial, health, securities, or public-sector requirements.
- Check contractual notice clauses, customer commitments, insurer conditions, and supplier agreements.
- Confirm whether a regulator, sector authority, owner, or board must be informed and by what deadline.
- Record the information each recipient requires and what can be withheld while facts remain unverified.
Consider voluntary reporting
CISA’s state-sponsored-threat guidance encourages reporting to CISA and/or the FBI when appropriate. A newer CISA advisory advises organizations to consider applicable mandatory reporting and additional voluntary reporting to appropriate agencies. Contact channels and submission processes can change, so verify the current official channel at the time of reporting rather than relying on an old address or form.
Control communications
Designate one communications lead and coordinate public statements with legal counsel and the incident lead. Share verified facts, customer or employee instructions, known impact, and actions people should take. Do not publish an actor name, motive, scope, or data-loss claim that the evidence does not support. For every notification, record sender, recipient, time, channel, content summary, and requested follow-up.
7. Eradicate, recover, and validate
Recovery begins only after the team has a defensible understanding of scope and has addressed persistent access. The exact order depends on the environment and the organization’s continuity plan.
Eradicate access
- Remove persistence mechanisms identified during investigation.
- Reset or revoke affected credentials, sessions, tokens, keys, certificates, and delegated access.
- Patch or otherwise mitigate the exploited weakness after preserving necessary evidence.
- Rebuild systems when integrity cannot be established; use known-good images and documented configuration.
- Check security controls and logging for tampering before returning systems to normal operation.
Restore in controlled stages
- Choose recovery sources whose integrity and pre-compromise dates are established.
- Restore the least-connected or lowest-risk components first and monitor closely.
- Validate identity, logging, segmentation, backups, application behavior, and business functions.
- Expand service gradually, with an explicit rollback plan and an owner for each gate.
- Continue heightened monitoring for re-entry, reused credentials, and unusual administrative activity.
Close only after validation
Require the incident lead and system owners to sign off that the known scope has been addressed, persistence checks are complete, required reports were made, critical services are operating safely, and monitoring is in place. Keep the incident record, evidence inventory, decisions, communications, and outstanding risks according to retention requirements.
Run the post-incident review
Review detection, escalation, evidence collection, containment effects, communication, supplier dependencies, and recovery. Turn findings into named corrective actions with owners and due dates. Update playbooks, access controls, logging coverage, backup protections, segmentation, training, and the OT resilience plan where applicable.
A practical checklist format
Put the following columns in the working document so no action becomes an unowned note:
| Field | Required entry |
|---|---|
| Item and phase | Trigger, coordinate, contain, preserve, scope, analyze, report, recover, or improve. |
| Owner | Named person and backup, not only a department. |
| Status | Not started, in progress, blocked, complete, or not applicable, with a reason. |
| Time | UTC timestamp and local time when operationally important. |
| Evidence or link | Incident-record entry, log reference, image hash, approval, or notification record. |
| Decision and rationale | What was chosen, alternatives considered, expected impact, and authorization. |
| Next review | Specific time or condition that reopens the item. |
Common failure modes and fixes
Public attribution before verification
Failure: a malware label or infrastructure match is treated as proof of a state actor. Fix: keep suspected, verified, and attributed states separate; require corroborating technical and contextual evidence.
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Remediation destroys the record
Failure: systems are patched, rebooted, or reimaged before volatile data and logs are preserved. Fix: decide with the forensic lead whether capture is safe and useful; if emergency containment comes first, document the evidence trade-off.
Scoping stops at the first host
Failure: the team cleans one endpoint while overlooking identity infrastructure, lateral movement, cloud control planes, backups, or suppliers. Fix: use the scope matrix and investigate connected systems, privileged accounts, and persistence.
Containment ignores operations
Failure: an isolation command interrupts safety-critical or revenue-critical processes. Fix: include system owners, operations, safety, and continuity leaders; define reversible controls and safe operating modes.
Old reporting contacts are used
Failure: a notification goes to an obsolete address or misses a current deadline. Fix: have counsel and compliance verify current requirements and official channels at the time of reporting.
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Failure: owners, times, evidence, and decisions are missing, so nobody can reconstruct what happened. Fix: make the document the authoritative incident record, review it at scheduled intervals, and preserve previous scope and decision versions.
What to adapt from the CISA federal playbook
Use the CISA playbook as a structured starting point for incident declaration, coordination, internal notification, categorization, scope determination, evidence preservation, technical analysis, mitigation, reporting, and closure. Do not copy federal agency-specific escalation paths or mandatory procedures into a private organization without checking whether they apply. Map each checklist item to your own authority model, legal obligations, sector rules, technology, suppliers, and continuity requirements.
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