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A usable incident response plan is a short, leadership-approved operating document that tells people what to do when email, chat, file storage, accounts, or other essential services are disrupted. It names a lead and backups, assigns decision authority, provides offline contacts, sets a first-response sequence, and explains how the organization will communicate and restore priority services.
Build the first version around your most important services rather than trying to document every system. CISA describes an incident response plan as a written document formally approved by senior leadership that helps an organization before, during, and after a suspected or confirmed security incident. Treat it as an operational guide to be tailored with qualified technical responders and legal counsel, not as a replacement for either.
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What an incident response plan must accomplish
During a suspected compromise, people need answers faster than they need a perfect technical diagnosis. The plan should make five things immediately clear:
- Who receives the initial report and who takes command if that person is unavailable.
- Which services, people, data, facilities, and external dependencies are essential.
- Who may authorize disruptive actions such as isolating a system, pausing transactions, resetting accounts, or changing a public service.
- How staff, providers, leadership, counsel, insurers, law enforcement, and the public will be contacted if normal channels fail.
- How decisions, evidence, recovery work, and lessons learned will be recorded.
The plan should cover preparation, response, and recovery. It is not a universal technical playbook: containment commands, forensic methods, and restoration procedures depend on your systems and should be directed by qualified technical staff or a contracted provider.
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How do we make an incident response plan if we don’t have a security team?
Start with a deliberately small document. A nonprofit or regional organization can assign several functions to the same person as long as every function has a named owner and backup. For example, an operations director might be the incident lead, while the finance director handles continuity decisions and an outside technology provider coordinates technical work.
Use a proportionate first version
- List essential services. Write down the services that must continue or be restored first: client or member intake, emergency communications, payroll, financial transactions, scheduling, case records, fundraising, or regional field operations.
- Identify dependencies. For each service, note the applications, accounts, devices, internet connections, cloud providers, payment processors, phone systems, and data stores it relies on.
- Assign authority. Name the executive who can approve a shutdown, suspend a process, change public-facing information, or accept a material operational risk. Name a delegate for nights, weekends, and leave periods.
- Write the first-response card. Keep the first actions short enough to follow under stress. Put technical detail in separate system-specific runbooks.
- Print the plan and contact list. Store copies where responders can reach them without logging into organizational systems.
- Walk through a realistic scenario. A spoken exercise can expose missing contacts and unclear authority without requiring a large security program.
Improve the document after every exercise or incident. A simple plan that people know how to use is safer than a comprehensive document that no one can find or understand.
Set scope, priorities, and decision authority
Define what counts as an incident
Use a broad reporting threshold. Staff should report suspicious account resets, unexpected multifactor prompts, lost devices, unusual payment requests, unavailable shared files, suspected malware, exposed personal information, or a service outage with an unexplained cause. The person reporting does not need to prove that an attack occurred.
Map essential services before individual systems
For each essential service, record the business owner, minimum acceptable operation, critical data, supporting systems, external providers, and a manual workaround. This lets the response team restore the service that people depend on rather than automatically restoring every system in the order it was built.
Write down authority boundaries
Specify who can make each time-sensitive decision. Include authority to isolate a device or account, stop a payment or registration process, disable remote access, reset credentials, contact a provider, notify affected people, involve law enforcement, and issue a public statement. If an action requires two approvals, identify both people and the emergency substitute.
Leadership approval matters. CISA’s guidance defines an incident response plan as formally approved by senior leadership, so record the approving body, approval date, version number, and next review date on the cover page.
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Who should be on the response team?
The roster should cover technology, communications, legal advice, business continuity, executive decisions, and provider coordination. A small organization may combine roles, but the plan must show who is acting in each capacity during a specific incident.
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1Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems2Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches3Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors| Function | Primary responsibility | Backup or external support |
|---|---|---|
| Incident lead | Declares the response, sets priorities, runs decision meetings, and maintains the incident timeline. | Named deputy with authority during absence or after-hours events. |
| Technical coordination | Works with internal administrators or a managed provider on triage, evidence preservation, containment, and recovery. | Technology provider escalation contact; identify who can act outside normal business hours. |
| Communications | Creates staff updates, coordinates the spokesperson, and routes approved external messages. | Alternate spokesperson and an offline staff-notification method. |
| Legal and privacy | Advises on evidence handling, contracts, confidentiality, reporting, and communications. | Outside counsel or designated substitute; do not assume an insurer’s panel is automatically your counsel. |
| Business continuity | Activates manual workarounds, protects safety, reallocates staff, and prioritizes service restoration. | Department leads for each essential service. |
| Executive decision maker | Approves disruptive actions, risk acceptance, major spending, and public positions. | Documented delegate for each operating period. |
| Provider and stakeholder liaison | Coordinates with critical vendors, funders, partners, insurers, and law enforcement when authorized. | Alternate liaison with copies of contracts and escalation terms. |
Include the role, person, organization, work and after-hours contact methods, authority limits, and backup for every entry. Do not rely on a single individual’s personal knowledge.
Build an offline contact and escalation sheet
Internal email, chat, and document storage may be unavailable or inaccessible during an incident. CISA recommends printing the plan and contact lists for that reason. Keep a controlled paper copy in a known office location and another in a separate, secure location. If you maintain an encrypted offline or removable-media copy, document how authorized responders access it without the affected identity system.
Fields to include
- Incident lead and deputy, including after-hours numbers.
- Executive approver and delegate.
- Technology administrators and provider escalation routes.
- Internet, phone, cloud, payment, payroll, and other critical service providers.
- Legal counsel, privacy adviser, and insurer or broker contact, if applicable.
- Local law-enforcement contact and the current regional CISA contact.
- Facilities, safety, safeguarding, and emergency contacts where physical safety could be affected.
- Alternate staff-notification channels and meeting locations.
- Contract numbers, support tiers, service identifiers, and any required verification information.
Confirm that the organization is permitted to contact each party and check provider contracts for notification windows, authentication requirements, and escalation limitations. Review the sheet at least quarterly and whenever a person, provider, phone number, or contract changes.
What do we do first if our systems are hacked?
Use a short sequence that protects people, preserves useful information, and avoids improvisation. The exact technical actions belong to the technical lead or provider.
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- Report the concern. Use the known reporting route. Do not penalize a good-faith report that turns out to be a false alarm.
- Alert the lead or deputy. Record the time, reporter, affected service or device, observable symptoms, and actions already taken. Do not ask staff to speculate about the attacker.
- Assess immediate impact. Decide whether safety, essential services, sensitive data, financial activity, or organizational systems may be affected. Bring in qualified technical help when the event could exceed internal capability.
- Preserve relevant records. Keep messages, alerts, access records, device details, and a decision timeline. Ask the technical lead how to preserve evidence without altering it.
- Coordinate containment. The technical lead or provider should recommend isolation, account protection, blocking, or shutdown steps. Before taking a disruptive action, consider safety, evidence, dependency effects, and the authority required.
- Set decision owners. Confirm who may authorize account resets, system shutdowns, transaction pauses, provider calls, notifications, and public statements.
- Start continuity work. Move essential activities to documented manual methods or alternate systems, and tell staff which work is paused.
- Recover in a controlled order. Restore priority services after technical and leadership checks, monitor for recurrence, and keep a record of what was restored and by whom.
- Review after stabilization. Capture the cause if known, decisions that helped or harmed, unresolved risks, assigned owners, and due dates for plan changes.
This sequence is an organizational coordination guide, not a replacement for technical incident response. CISA’s federal incident-response playbook has requirements tailored to federal civilian executive-branch agencies; a nonprofit or regional organization should adapt the concepts to its own systems and obligations.
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How can we respond if email is down?
Decide the fallback channels before an outage. The plan should state which channel is primary, which is secondary, who may use it, and how staff verify that an instruction is genuine.
Prepare a communications fallback
- Keep printed contact and role sheets at offices and operational sites.
- Maintain an out-of-band phone tree with personal or alternate numbers that staff have consented to use.
- Identify a meeting point or staffed phone line for workers who cannot receive digital updates.
- Use a preselected alternate messaging method only if it has been assessed for access, privacy, and account ownership.
- Set an update cadence, such as a specific check-in time, so silence is not mistaken for resolution.
- Tell staff how to verify an urgent request, especially requests involving money, credentials, or sensitive records.
Do not put unverified technical conclusions in a mass message. The communications lead should issue factual updates approved by the incident lead and, where appropriate, counsel. A holding statement can acknowledge a service disruption, provide a safe contact route, and say that assessment is under way without asserting facts that have not been established.
Plan continuity and restoration around essential services
Recovery is not the same as bringing every system back online. Rank services by safety, legal or contractual importance, dependence of vulnerable people, financial impact, and the time staff can operate manually.
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| Priority question | What the plan should record |
|---|---|
| What must continue immediately? | Service owner, minimum operating level, safety controls, and manual procedure. |
| What can be paused? | Activities that may wait, who approves the pause, and how people are informed. |
| What is needed to restore? | Clean accounts, backups, provider action, hardware, approvals, and validation tests. |
| How will restoration be verified? | Named tester, expected result, access review, data-integrity check, and monitoring period. |
Document manual workarounds before a crisis. Examples include a paper intake form, a call-in process for urgent cases, a preapproved payment hold procedure, an alternate scheduling list, or a local copy of essential contact information. State where completed paper records are secured and how they will be reconciled after systems return.
Prepare communications for staff, partners, and the public
Assign one authorized spokesperson and one approver for external messages. Decide which audiences require separate notices: employees, volunteers, service users, members, donors, funders, regulators, suppliers, and partner organizations.
Internal updates should answer
- What service or location is affected?
- What should people do now, and what should they avoid doing?
- Which workarounds are approved?
- When is the next update, even if there is no major change?
- Where should questions and suspected follow-on activity be reported?
External messages should be controlled
Use a holding statement framework rather than a prewritten claim about an unverified breach. Counsel and the incident lead should determine what can be disclosed, to whom, and when. Preserve a copy of each approved message, its approval time, the audience, and the channel used.
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What legal and contractual questions belong in the plan?
Ask counsel to map obligations for the organization’s location, data, affected people, contracts, funders, insurers, and regulators. The applicable breach-notification rules and deadlines vary; there is no universal deadline that can safely be inserted into every nonprofit plan.
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How should a small organization exercise the plan?
CISA recommends practicing realistic scenarios at least annually. A small team can gain substantial value from a short spoken walkthrough instead of a costly simulation.
Example annual scenario
Ask participants to imagine that a finance director reports an unexpected account reset and an unavailable shared drive on a weekend. Then ask, in order:
- Who receives the report, and how is the time and initial evidence recorded?
- Who becomes incident lead if the usual lead is away?
- How does the team reach the technology provider without organizational email?
- Who can pause transactions or disconnect a system?
- Which services must continue manually?
- What channel sends instructions to staff?
- Who decides whether counsel, an insurer, law enforcement, partners, or affected people should be contacted?
- How will the team approve and verify restoration?
Do not grade the exercise by whether participants guessed a technical cause. Grade it by whether they could find contacts, make authorized decisions, communicate safely, preserve records, and keep essential work moving.
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- Record each gap, such as an outdated number or missing provider contract.
- Assign one owner and a due date for every fix.
- Update the plan, contact sheet, and relevant system runbooks.
- Tell participants what changed so the next exercise tests the improved process.
Maintain the plan as an operational document
Set a review schedule and event-driven updates. Review the plan at least annually and after a real incident, a major system change, a new provider, an office move, a leadership change, or a change in legal advice.
Version-control basics
- Put the version, approval date, owner, and next review date on every copy.
- Keep a change log describing what changed and why.
- Remove obsolete printed copies when roles or numbers change.
- Restrict sensitive contact and system details to people who need them.
- Test that the offline copy is readable and reachable without the affected identity system.
Useful plan pages to create
One-page incident card
Include the reporting instruction, incident lead and deputy, first-response sequence, authority summary, emergency meeting location, and fallback communication method. This page is for immediate use, not for technical detail.
Role and authority matrix
For each function, list primary, backup, after-hours availability, decisions authorized, and decisions requiring executive or legal approval.
Service-priority worksheet
For every essential service, record the owner, users affected, dependencies, minimum operation, manual workaround, restoration order, validation test, and provider escalation route.
Decision and event log
Use a simple table with timestamp, fact or report, decision, decision maker, action owner, evidence location, and next review time. A consistent log prevents conflicting accounts and helps counsel and technical responders understand what happened.
When should you use outside help?
Bring in outside technical responders when the organization cannot confidently determine scope, preserve evidence, contain the event, or restore systems safely. Contact providers when their service, credentials, infrastructure, or logs may be involved. Consult counsel early when sensitive data, contracts, insurance, public statements, or possible notifications are involved.
When evaluating a retainer, managed service, insurer, or recovery provider, compare response scope, availability, authority to act, data handling, geographic coverage, escalation commitments, contractual exclusions, and fit with existing systems. The plan should name the category of help required and the approved contact route; it does not need to endorse a particular vendor.
Use free guidance and regional assistance
CISA provides planning guidance, small-organization resources, and regional assistance that may change over time. During plan maintenance, confirm the current regional contact and available services rather than relying on an old phone number or webpage printout. Staff training should include how to report suspicious events and how to reach the organization’s own incident lead before seeking outside assistance.
Final readiness check
- Senior leadership has approved the current version.
- An incident lead and deputy are named for all operating periods.
- Technology, communications, legal, continuity, executive, and provider-liaison functions are assigned.
- Essential services and their dependencies have owners and restoration priorities.
- Authority for shutdowns, resets, notifications, spending, and public statements is explicit.
- Printed contacts and the first-response card are reachable without organizational systems.
- Fallback communication and manual workarounds have been tested.
- Staff know how to report suspicious activity without fear of punishment for a good-faith mistake.
- A realistic exercise is scheduled at least annually, with owners and due dates for improvements.
- Counsel has reviewed how jurisdiction, data, contracts, funders, insurers, and regulators affect decisions.
The best plan is not the longest one. It is the version that a small team can find, understand, and use when normal systems and assumptions are unavailable.
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