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08/06/2026 4:57 pm
TL;DR: Cyber attacks rose to 1,308 per organization per week in Q1 2024, up 5% from Q1 2023 and 28% from Q4 2023, while the average data breach cost reached $4.88 million, according to StrongDM's source article. Incident response is now an access governance problem as much as a containment problem.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by StrongDM: Incident Response Plan, Your 7-Step Process
By the numbers:
- The average number of cyber attacks in the first quarter of 2024 rose to 1,308 per organization per week.
- The average cost of a data breach is up to $4.88 million.
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams build an incident response plan around privileged access?
A: Start by assigning containment authority, defining account-disablement procedures, and mapping critical assets to named responders.
Q: Why does incident response depend so heavily on identity governance?
A: Because most incidents move through identities, entitlements, and privileged paths before they are fully understood.
Q: What breaks when teams do not preserve evidence during containment?
A: They lose the ability to reconstruct root cause, prove scope, and support compliance or legal review.
Practitioner guidance
- Map incident authority to privileged access controls Define who can disable accounts, isolate systems, and approve emergency containment actions before an incident occurs.
- Inventory identities and critical assets together Maintain a single view of the accounts, service credentials, and systems that matter most to containment and recovery.
- Preserve access logs as forensic evidence Treat authentication, authorization, and administrative activity logs as part of incident evidence handling.
What's in the full article
StrongDM's full blog covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- The seven-step response workflow mapped into a practical checklist for teams building an internal incident playbook.
- Examples of short-term and long-term containment actions, including account disabling and network segmentation.
- The article's suggested recovery sequence, including three-tier system restoration and backup validation steps.
- How StrongDM positions logging and access control within response, investigation, and continuous monitoring.
👉 Read StrongDM's incident response framework for secure access environments →
Incident response planning for NHI and privileged access gaps?
Explore further
08/06/2026 6:51 pm
Incident response is an access governance discipline, not just a security operations checklist. The article's strongest contribution is its implicit warning that response fails when teams cannot see, classify, and disable identities fast enough. In practice, the gap shows up first in privileged access, where delayed containment lets an incident become a governance failure as well as a technical one.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 72% of organisations have experienced or suspect they have experienced a breach of non-human identities, according to The 2024 ESG Report: Managing Non-Human Identities.
- Enterprises that have experienced a compromised NHI averaged 2.7 separate incidents in the past 12 months, according to Oasis Security & ESG.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who is accountable when an incident response plan fails?
A: Accountability rests with the organisation that owns the assets, access decisions, and response process, not with the incident itself. Frameworks such as NIST 800-61 and related governance policies require that roles, communication paths, and escalation authority are pre-defined. If no one can isolate access or preserve evidence, responsibility has already been poorly assigned.
👉 Read our full editorial: Incident response planning for privileged access and NHI risk
