Communication among incident responders — A study

Responding to some future incident might require significant cooperation by multiple teams or organizations within an incident response community. To study the effectiveness of that cooperation, the Carnegie Mellon® Software Engineering Institute (SEI) conducted a study using a group of volunteer, autonomous incident response organizations. These organizations completed special SEI-designed tasks that required them to work together. The study identified three factors as likely to help or hinder the cooperation of incident responders: being prepared, being organized, and following incident response best practices. This technical note describes those factors and offers recommendations for implementing each one.