About this IT Incident Remediation course
Critical vulnerabilities, compromised certificates and emergency vendor updates have a habit of arriving at inconvenient times. The technical fix may be relatively straightforward. Deciding whether you are affected, establishing the real level of risk, coordinating the response, deploying safely and proving that remediation has worked can be considerably harder.
This practical workshop helps development, infrastructure, operations and security teams build a repeatable emergency remediation process that works under pressure.
Rather than concentrating on a particular operating system, cloud platform or software stack, the workshop uses realistic scenarios to explore the decisions that need to be made from the moment an urgent advisory appears through to verified remediation and post-incident review.
However, if you have a specific issue you need to fix, we'll be happy to explore tailoring options with you, in confidence.
We can explore your organisation's environment and tooling, including scenarios involving a specific application dependency, operating-system update, container image, cloud service, TLS certificate, network appliance, third-party component or other technology relevant to your team.
The emphasis throughout is practical: who needs to know what, who makes the decisions, what evidence is needed, how do we deploy safely, and how do we know when we're really finished?
That approach reflects established guidance. NIST SP 800-40 Rev. 4 defines enterprise patch management as identifying, prioritising, acquiring, installing and verifying patches, updates and upgrades, while CISA's Cybersecurity Incident & Vulnerability Response Playbooks explicitly cover identification, coordination, remediation, recovery and tracking mitigations.
-
By the end of this course, attendees will be able to:
- Recognise the sources and warning signs that should trigger an emergency remediation process.
- Quickly determine whether a newly disclosed issue actually affects their environment.
- Distinguish severity, likelihood, exposure and business impact when setting priorities.
- Establish clear ownership and decision-making during an urgent response.
- Gather reliable information without being overwhelmed by conflicting advisories and social-media noise.
- Choose between patching, upgrading, configuration changes, isolation and other compensating controls.
- Assess the risks associated with deploying an emergency change versus delaying it.
- Design proportionate test, backup, rollback and recovery arrangements.
- Coordinate remediation across development, operations, security, management and external suppliers.
- Verify that a fix or mitigation has actually been applied and is effective.
- Check for indications that exploitation or compromise may already have occurred.
- Record decisions and evidence so that they can be explained later to customers, auditors and other stakeholders.
- Turn lessons learned from an emergency into improvements to normal patching and vulnerability-management processes.
-
This workshop is suitable for people involved in operating, developing, securing or supporting business-critical technology, including:
Developers and software engineers
DevOps and platform engineers
System and infrastructure administrators
Cloud engineers
Security and vulnerability-management teams
Technical support and operations teams
Engineering and technical leads
IT managers
Service owners
The workshop works particularly well with a cross-functional group, since urgent remediation rarely belongs entirely to one team.
-
Participants should have a general understanding of their organisation's applications, infrastructure or development environment.
No knowledge of a particular operating system, programming language, cloud platform or security product is required.
Some familiarity with normal software deployment, change management, system administration or application development will be useful.
For tailored workshops, participants can bring examples of their own deployment pipelines, asset inventories, monitoring systems, vulnerability-management tools or change processes to use during the exercises.
-
This Incident Remediation course is available for private / custom delivery for your team - as an in-house face-to-face workshop at your location of choice, or as online instructor-led training via MS Teams (or your own preferred platform).
Get in touch to find out how we can deliver tailored training which focuses on your project requirements and learning goals.
-
Day 1: From disclosure to decision
When the alarm goes off
Where urgent security information comes from
Vendor advisories, CVEs, CERTs, security researchers and threat intelligence
Identifying authoritative sources
Separating confirmed facts from speculation
Understanding CVE and CWE information
Reading CVSS without treating it as the whole answer
Known exploitation versus theoretical vulnerability
Recognising when normal patch management needs to become an emergency response
Are we actually affected?
Establishing which products, versions and services are in use
Software and dependency inventories
SBOMs and package manifests
Discovering forgotten and indirectly affected systems
Internet-facing versus internal exposure
Third-party and managed services
Asking suppliers the right questions
Recording what has been checked
Dealing honestly with incomplete information
Practical exercise: An urgent advisory arrives. Teams establish what they know, what they don't know and whether their fictional environment is affected.
How urgent is urgent?
Vulnerability severity versus organisational risk
CVSS, EPSS and known exploitation
Asset exposure and business criticality
Using CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities as an exploitation signal
Deciding what interrupts planned work
Creating simple escalation criteria
When senior management needs to be involved
Documenting and explaining a remediation decision
Building the response team
Establishing technical ownership
Incident lead versus subject-matter experts
Developers, operations, security and service owners
Working with hosting providers and software vendors
Internal communications
Customer and stakeholder communications
Keeping an actionable response log
Avoiding duplicated or contradictory work
Workshop exercise: Build an emergency-remediation RACI or equivalent responsibility model for your team.
Patch, mitigate or wait?
Understanding the vendor's recommended remediation
Patch versus version upgrade
Configuration changes and feature disablement
Network and access restrictions
WAF and other compensating controls
Taking services offline
Risks created by rushed changes
Unsupported and end-of-life components
Making and documenting risk-based decisions
Day 2: Deploy, verify and improve
Preparing an emergency change
Determining what needs to change
Dependencies and knock-on effects
Establishing an acceptable test scope
Backups and restore points
Rollback criteria and planning
Maintenance windows versus immediate deployment
Approvals without unnecessary bureaucracy
Preserving evidence before making changes
Testing when time is short
Risk-based testing
Selecting high-value regression tests
Automated testing and deployment pipelines
Smoke testing and health checks
Testing security controls
Staging versus production
Canary and phased deployments
Deciding when there is enough evidence to proceed
Practical exercise: Design a rapid test-and-rollback plan for an urgent production fix.
Deploying and tracking remediation
Coordinating deployment across multiple systems
Emergency change control
Automation versus manual intervention
Recording systems as they are remediated
Handling partial success
Failed deployments and rollback
Systems which cannot immediately be patched
Monitoring while remediation continues
Proving that the problem is fixed
Version checks and their limitations
Vendor backports and patched builds
Configuration verification
Vulnerability scanning
Functional and security testing
Reviewing logs and monitoring
Confirming compensating controls
Obtaining evidence from managed-service providers
Maintaining a defensible remediation record
What if they got there first?
Determining when vulnerability remediation becomes incident response
Reviewing systems for signs of exploitation
Logs, alerts and indicators of compromise
Preserving forensic evidence
Credential and secret rotation
Certificates, keys and trust relationships
Escalating to the incident-response process
Knowing when specialist investigation is required
Closing the incident properly
Confirming completion
Recording affected and unaffected systems
Capturing technical evidence
Internal and external communications
Customer assurance questions
Regulatory and contractual considerations
Post-incident review
What surprised us?
What slowed us down?
Which information was missing?
What should be automated before this happens again?
Tabletop exercise: Zero day!
The workshop concludes with a facilitated scenario based either on a generic fictional incident or on your own technology environment.
Teams receive information progressively, for example:
Initial advisory → uncertain exposure → evidence of active exploitation → vendor mitigation → emergency patch → deployment problem → revised vendor guidance → verification → customer assurance request
Participants work through the response using the processes developed during the course.
The team leaves with a draft Emergency Remediation Playbook that they can adapt for their organisation.
-
Do you need to be a cybersecurity specialist to attend?
No. The workshop is designed for developers, DevOps and platform engineers, system administrators, technical leads, IT managers and security teams who may be involved when an urgent vulnerability or technical issue needs attention. A general understanding of your organisation’s applications or infrastructure is sufficient.
Can this workshop be tailored to our technology stack?
Yes. The workshop is platform-agnostic and can be adapted to the technologies and processes your team actually uses. Exercises can be based around operating systems, cloud infrastructure, application dependencies, containers, certificates, network devices, managed services or other components relevant to your organisation.
Is this a patch management course?
Patch management is part of the workshop, but the scope is broader. The course covers the complete response to an urgent technical vulnerability or remediation requirement, including assessing exposure and severity, deciding whether to patch or mitigate, coordinating the response, testing and rollback, deployment, verification, checking for possible compromise and documenting the outcome.
Can we use our own security incidents or vulnerabilities as workshop scenarios?
Yes. For private team deliveries, the exercises and tabletop scenario can be adapted around your organisation’s environment, processes and previous incidents. You can also use an anonymised or hypothetical version if you would prefer not to discuss sensitive technical details during the workshop.
What will our team take away from the workshop?
As well as practical experience responding to realistic emergency scenarios, the workshop helps teams identify improvements to their own remediation process. In the two-day version, participants can develop the basis of an Emergency Remediation Playbook, covering escalation, ownership, risk assessment, testing, deployment, verification, communications and post-incident review.
-
NIST SP 800-40 Rev. 4: Guide to Enterprise Patch Management Planning – practical guidance for establishing an organisational patch-management strategy.
CISA Cybersecurity Incident & Vulnerability Response Playbooks – useful models for vulnerability and incident-response processes.
FIRST Exploit Prediction Scoring System (EPSS) – exploitation-probability data that can help inform prioritisation.
FIRST Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) – the standard severity-scoring framework, with the current CVSS v4.0 documentation and training resources.
Trusted by
