One of the first unspoken lessons learned as a computer security expert and member of an incident response team is that no matter how much you prepare, and no matter how organized your schedule is, your duty pager will always go off at the most inconvenient time possible, whether that’s 5:00 p.m. on Friday or 3:30 a.m. on Wednesday morning. Just like your local firefighters, a professional incident responder’s job is to immediately deploy to the scene of the problem, respond to, and resolve the incident, whether it’s with a keyboard and sniffer or a truck and firehose.
The second lesson is that you never get used to the first lesson. That, and Murphy’s Law is with you every time the pager goes off.
If this appeals to you, continue reading and learn how to become an effective incident responder. If this kind of life doesn’t appeal to you, but you work in the IT profession, continue reading anyway -- those doing incident response will need your support at some point. So why not join them and see what all the fuss is about? After all, forewarned is forearmed.
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