A SIEM alert is an indication requiring validation; it is not automatically a confirmed security incident. The analyst must therefore begin with triage . Triage establishes whether the activity is legitimate or malicious, determines the affected systems or accounts, evaluates severity and business impact, and establishes the appropriate investigative and escalation path.
Typical triage activities include reviewing the underlying events, checking source and destination information, identifying affected assets, correlating supporting telemetry, evaluating detection confidence, examining threat intelligence, and determining whether the alert represents a true positive. Only after this assessment can the incident be assigned an appropriate priority and routed to the correct responders.
Contacting an incident coordinator before establishing whether the alert represents meaningful risk may create unnecessary escalation. Recovery activities occur substantially later, after detection, analysis, containment, and eradication activities have established what happened and controlled the threat. Escalating directly to the help desk is similarly premature and may be inappropriate for a security event.
NIST's current incident-response model places detection and analysis before response and recovery actions and emphasizes determining event characteristics so appropriate response actions can follow.
Study Guide Reference: Incident Response and Management → Detection → Alert Validation → Triage → Analysis → Severity Determination → Escalation.
