What Is a Computer Incident?

Although the term “computer incident” is frequently used in many forums, it does not have a universally accepted definition. The following are some examples of how the term is defined in just a few publications:

  • Incidents are events that interrupt normal operating procedures and precipitate some level of crisis. Specifically, incidents are computer intrusions, denial-of-service attacks, insiders' theft of information, and any unauthorized or unlawful network-based activity that require computer security personnel, system administrators, or computer crime investigators to respond.[1]

    [1] Mandia, Kevin, and Chris Prosise. Incident Response Investigating Computer Crime. Berkeley, CA: Osborne/McGraw-Hill Publishing, 2001, ...

Get Effective Incident Response Team, The now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.