Understand Microsoft Online Services incident response phase 4 - post-incident activity
Post-mortem
After the incident has been resolved, select security incidents, especially those that are customer-impacting or result in a data breach, undergo a full incident post-mortem. The post-mortem is designed to identify technical lapses, procedural failures, manual errors, and other process flaws that might have contributed to the incident or that were identified during the incident response process. This process generally includes:
- A deep analysis of the root cause and investigation to identify any opportunities to improve system security or the security incident response process.
- Discussion with Product Group Subject Matter Experts along with Security and Privacy Experts to identify opportunities for improvements in process, training, or technology.
- Implementation of new automated monitoring and detection mechanisms to discover similar issues in the future.
- Recording any findings as ticketed work items or bugs to be addressed by product teams as part of our normal Security Development Lifecycle and assigning these items to appropriate owning teams for follow-up.
- Discussing the results of the completed post-mortem in monthly security incident review meetings conducted by senior management.
Continuous improvement
Lessons learned from the security incident are implemented with coordination from the security response team to help prevent future incidents and improve detection and response capabilities. Continuous improvement is paramount for effective and efficient incident response. Post-incident activities ensure that lessons learned from the security incident are successfully implemented across the enterprise to defend Microsoft and its customers against evolving threats.