Build Series Vol. 04 — Incident Response Lab

The capability to investigate, contain and report — built before you need it, including the reporting clocks measured in hours rather than days.

The decision this volume is really about: who may authorise containment at 2am, and collecting evidence before anyone remediates.

Control mapping first. The exact SOC 2, ISO 27001:2022, NIST CSF 2.0, CIS v8.1, CMMC, PCI DSS v4.0.1 and HIPAA clauses this build satisfies are printed before any installation step, so the work becomes audit evidence rather than a side effect of it.

A validation harness, not just a build. How to prove the control works and — the part nothing free covers — how to catch it failing quietly: the expired scan credential, the canary that stopped, the encryption key nobody can recover, the segmentation your diagram claims and your firewall does not.

Three sized architectures with honest hour counts. Tier 1 is 15–25 hrs to build · 2–4 hrs a month plus exercises.

Stack: Velociraptor · DFIR-IRIS · MISP · isolated analysis network.

Current as of August 2026. TheHive has been a commercial product since 2022 and DFIR-IRIS is the open path. CIRCIA's final rule is expected this month; its 72-hour incident and 24-hour ransom-payment clocks are statutory and have not moved through four years of delays.

Every volume runs the same nine sections: prerequisites, control mapping, the decisions that matter, three sized architectures, a build runbook, a validation harness, an evidence pack, an operating cadence with honest hour counts, failure modes and the buy line, and an AI prompt pack.

Reading order: read 7th of ten. Each volume stands alone, and each is cheaper to build if the one before it exists.

Ships without support. This is a document, not a service contract — and Section 8 tells you plainly where the buy line is.