Zero-day vulnerabilities, misconfigurations, and human error make cyber breaches inevitable. In 2024 the global average cost of a data breach reached USD 4.88 million, a 10% increase on the previous year. One in three breaches involved unmanaged or unknown data assets – highlighting the challenges in tracking and safeguarding proliferations, and a study analysing over 200 data breaches between April 2024 and April 2025 found 94% of leaked passwords were reused across multiple accounts. The real differentiator in cybersecurity lies in the ability to detect, investigate, and respond to incidents. This is called the DIR model. Detect threats quickly; investigate them confidently, and respond decisively.
What is detect, investigate, respond?
Organisations often over-invest in detection and under invest in investigation and response, falling victim to breaches not because they missed the detection, but because their investigation and response was slow, ineffective, or hampered by internal obstacles. Detect, investigate, respond gives you a structure for planning your reactions in advance.
Detect: the balance between signal and noise
Detection is the first step in incident response. However, effective detection is about precision, not volume – are you detecting the right threats, at the right time? Overloading security teams with alerts can cripple their ability to respond. Detection systems should be smart, scalable, and strategically-aligned to reduce noise and minimise blind spots.
Coverage across environments
Ensure visibility across endpoints, cloud, and network environments. This comprehensive coverage helps in identifying threats that may be lurking in different parts of the digital estate.
Reducing false positives
Invest in reducing false positives to maintain analyst trust and efficiency. False positives can degrade the trust in the system and slow down the response time.
Dynamic detection
Regularly update detection logic with threat intelligence and align it to the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by adversaries. This ensures that the detection mechanisms are always up-to-date with the latest threat landscape.
Questions to ask
- Are there gaps in your coverage?
- Is your data correlated across layers?
- Are your detections tuned to match your threat profile?
Investigate: from alert to insight
Once an alert is detected, the real work begins. Effective investigation enables security teams to distinguish between benign and malicious activity quickly.
Speed and skill
Rapidly assess alerts to determine their validity and impact. The faster the investigation, the quicker the response, reducing the potential damage.
Deep technical proficiency
Understand file systems, operating system internals, network protocols, and malware analysis. This technical knowledge is crucial for accurately identifying and understanding threats.
Timeliness
Act swiftly to prevent data exfiltration, privilege escalation, or total environment compromise. Timeliness is critical in ensuring that threats are contained before they can cause significant damage.
Purposeful investigation
Go beyond containment to understand the root cause and broader implications of an incident.
Questions to ask
- How did it get there?
- How long as it been there?
- What else did the threat actor do?
- Was this a one-off, or part of a wider campaign?
Respond: the power to act
You’ve detected the threat, you’ve investigated its cause, now you must mitigate it effectively. The faster the response, the less damage is done.
Authority and empowerment
Ensure SOCs and IR teams have the permission to take immediate action. This includes isolating machines, disabling user accounts, and blocking network traffic without waiting for board-level approval.
Organisational buy-in
Secure leadership support for short-term disruption to prevent long-term damage. This means having a clear mandate that justifies immediate actions to contain threats.
Strategic containment
Sometimes the right move is to observe threat actors to understand their behaviour before taking action. This requires maturity and a defined playbook, but this approach can provide valuable insights into the threat actor’s methods and objectives.
Questions to ask:
- Who owns what action?
- What are the thresholds?
- How fast can decisions be made?
- Who responds and how?
A strong response plan covers investigation, containment, and recovery. The starting point is confirming and understanding the threat. Then systems need to be isolated, accounts blocked, and lateral movement stopped. In the recovery phase you should be thinking about remediation and restoring services.
Once all of this is in place you need to reflect on what happened and consider how you can learn from the incident.
The DIR model isn't just a technical process. It’s the heart of cyber and operational resilience. Success doesn’t come from perfection in one or two of these areas. It comes from building strength across all three.
For more insight and guidance, contact Hitesh Mistry.
