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Incident Response

Incident Response Playbook for Lean Engineering Teams

Practical playbook for lean engineering teams to handle security incidents efficiently without dedicated security staff. Covers preparation through post-mortem.

By HackproofHacks Research Team Updated Jan 4, 2026 15 min read
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Incident Response Timeline: Detection, Containment, and Recovery Phases
Incident response timeline showing MTTD/MTTR phases: Detection (fast), Containment (critical), Recovery (measured).

Preparation Phase

Lean engineering teams prioritize lightweight tools and cross-training to handle incidents without dedicated security staff.

Establish a core response team of 3-5 members with defined roles: Incident Commander (senior engineer for decisions), Tech Lead (root cause analysis), and Communications Lead (updates stakeholders).

Inventory critical assets like code repos, Vercel deployments, and customer data stores, then set up monitoring with free tiers of tools such as Sentry for errors and UptimeRobot for availability.

  • Document contact lists in a shared Notion or Google Sheet, including on-call rotations.
  • Run quarterly tabletop exercises simulating breaches like API key leaks or DDoS on your Next.js apps.
  • Automate backups via GitHub Actions and test restores weekly to minimize downtime.
Pro Tip
Cross-train your entire team on basic forensics using tools like Wireshark and Volatility – everyone contributes during P0 incidents.

Detection and Identification

Rapid detection relies on integrated alerts rather than 24/7 monitoring.

Configure GitHub Dependabot, Vercel logs, and Cloudflare for anomaly notifications pushed to Slack channels.

Classify incidents by severity: P0 (production outage), P1 (data exposure), P2 (degraded perf), using indicators like unusual 5xx errors or failed logins.

Triage within 15 minutes by gathering logs via vercel logs and checking for IOCs with open-source tools like Holehe for email recon or FFUF for endpoint fuzzing.

Example triage commands:
1. vercel logs --since=1h
2. ffuf -u https://yourapp.com/FUZZ -w wordlist.txt
3. holehe email@target.com

Containment Strategies

Isolate threats without halting velocity: for suspected breaches, rotate API keys immediately and deploy Vercel previews to bypass prod.

Use Docker containers for sandboxed analysis, revoking GitHub tokens and IP whitelisting via Cloudflare.

  • Short-term: Disable compromised endpoints with Vercel redirects.
  • Long-term: Enforce least-privilege via Vercel Access and environment variables.

Eradication and Recovery

Scan with Nikto or WhatWeb on staging mirrors, then patch via PRs with automated tests.

Restore from Git history or Vercel rollbacks, monitoring for re-exploitation with Burp Suite scans post-deploy.

Validate recovery through canary deploys: 10% traffic first, scaling if metrics hold.

Post-Incident Review

Conduct blameless retrospectives within 48 hours, documenting in a GitHub Issue template with root cause, timeline, and action items.

Update playbooks and run a follow-up drill; track MTTR improvements quarterly.

Lean Team Tools

Category Recommended Tools Why for Lean Teams
Monitoring Sentry, Vercel Analytics Free tiers, integrates with your stack
Analysis Burp Suite Community, FFUF No-cost pentest essentials
Comms Slack/Telegram on-call Instant escalation without emails
Automation GitHub Actions CI/CD for patches and backups

Implement Your Playbook Today

Download the Markdown template, customize for your Vercel/Next.js stack, and run your first simulation this week.

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References & Further Reading

Use these to deepen your playbook and align with standards.