Glossary
Incident Response
The structured process for detecting, investigating, and remediating AI agent security breaches, failures, or policy violations.
What is Incident Response?
Incident response defines how organizations handle agent malfunctions, security compromises, or unexpected behaviors. Standard processes include detection through monitoring, initial assessment to determine severity, containment to limit damage, investigation to identify root causes, remediation to fix issues, and post-incident review to prevent recurrence. Clear procedures reduce response time and minimize impact.
For AI agents, incidents may include prompt injection attacks, hallucination-caused errors, data leaks, unexpected behaviors, or performance degradation. Response teams need access to audit logs, ability to quickly disable agents, rollback capabilities, and communication protocols for stakeholders. Practiced incident response with documented runbooks improves outcomes compared to ad-hoc crisis management.
Example
A customer service agent begins exposing customer email addresses in responses. Monitoring detects the anomaly within 5 minutes, automatically triggering incident response. The agent is immediately disabled, affected customers are identified from logs, security reviews the prompt injection that caused the leak, and a patched version deploys within 2 hours.
How Signet addresses this
Signet's Reliability and Security dimensions evaluate incident response capabilities including mean time to detect, mean time to recover, and documented procedures. Agents with mature incident response achieve higher scores, while slow or absent response capabilities reduce trust.
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