What is the primary objective of incident response?

• A. Identify, respond to, and recover from incidents.
• B. Protect all systems from future incidents.
• C. Store data securely.
• D. Block all external access.

Answer: (A)

The main idea behind incident response is to handle security events in a way that quickly detects them, takes action to contain and neutralize the threat, and restores normal operations as safely and as fast as possible. This involves identifying that an incident is occurring, responding to limit damage and stop the spread, recovering affected systems to a trusted state, and learning from the event to strengthen defenses. While broader goals like preventing future incidents, securely storing data, or blocking external access are important parts of security, they don’t describe the immediate purpose of incident response, which is to manage the incident itself and return the environment to normal operation.