What is the first step in the Six-Step Incident Response Process?

• A. Recovery
• B. Preparation
• C. Identification
• D. Eradication and Remediation

Answer: (B)

Preparation is the first step because incident response begins with readiness and planning. This stage sets up everything the team needs to respond effectively: defining roles and responsibilities, establishing an incident response team, creating and practicing runbooks, setting up communication plans, ensuring logging, telemetry, and monitoring are in place, and defining criteria for what constitutes an incident. With solid preparation, the organization can quickly detect, analyze, and triage events, and then move smoothly into containment, eradication, and recovery. Without this groundwork, detection may be slow or ambiguous, decisions become ad hoc, and the later steps lose effectiveness. The other steps come after you’ve identified an incident or started restoring services, but preparation lays the foundation for a coordinated and efficient response.