Plan for Incident Response
Implementation Effort: Medium — Planning an incident response strategy requires coordination between security operations, platform teams, and automation tooling, along with continuous improvement and testing.
User Impact: Low — Incident response planning and execution are handled by security teams and automation systems, with no direct impact on end users unless containment actions are triggered.
Overview
A well-structured incident response plan ensures that security teams can detect, investigate, contain, and recover from threats targeting Azure services like App Service, Key Vault, and Resource Manager. Microsoft Defender for Cloud and the Microsoft Defender portal provide tools to manage incidents across these services.
Key Phases of Incident Response
1. Preparation
- Define roles and responsibilities for incident response.
- Establish alerting thresholds and escalation paths.
- Integrate Defender for App Service, Key Vault, and Resource Manager with Microsoft Defender XDR and Sentinel for unified visibility 1.
2. Detection and Triage
- Use the incident queue in the Microsoft Defender portal to identify high-priority incidents.
- Filter by severity, resource type, and detection source.
- Assign incidents to analysts and tag them for tracking 1.
3. Investigation
- Use the attack story and alert story views to understand the scope and origin of the incident.
- Investigate impacted entities such as App Services, Key Vaults, or Resource Manager operations.
- Use the Evidence and Response tab to gather supporting data 1.
4. Containment and Eradication
- Disable compromised App Services or enforce secure configurations 2.
- Revoke access or rotate secrets in Key Vault if suspicious access is detected 3.
- Remove unauthorized role assignments or block malicious IPs in Resource Manager 1.
5. Recovery
- Restore affected services to a known good state.
- Validate that all threats have been removed before re-enabling services.
6. Post-Incident Learning
- Document the incident, response actions, and lessons learned.
- Update playbooks, policies, and automation workflows.
- Use Threat Analytics to understand broader attack trends and improve defenses 1.
This strategy supports all three Zero Trust principles:
- Verify Explicitly: Investigate every alert with full context.
- Use Least Privilege Access: Remove unnecessary permissions during containment.
- Assume Breach: Treat every alert as a potential compromise and respond accordingly.