Certified: The ISACA AAISM Audio Course

In this episode, we’re going to focus on containment, which is the moment an incident response shifts from understanding what happened to actively stopping harm. For beginners, containment can sound dramatic, like pulling a fire alarm, but good containment is usually a set of controlled moves that limit exposure while keeping essential operations running. With A I systems, containment often means restricting who can use the system, what the system can access, and where outputs can go, because those are the pathways along which harm spreads. The faster you can limit those pathways, the less time attackers have to probe, the less chance sensitive data has to leak, and the less likely unsafe outputs are to reach real users. By the end, you should be able to explain what containment means for A I incidents, why it must be fast but careful, and how access limits and flow controls reduce damage.

Before we continue, a quick note: this audio course is a companion to our course companion books. The first book is about the exam and provides detailed information on how to pass it best. The second book is a Kindle-only eBook that contains 1,000 flashcards that can be used on your mobile device or Kindle. Check them both out at Cyber Author dot me, in the Bare Metal Study Guides Series.

Containment is different from eradication and recovery, and keeping that difference clear helps you make better decisions under pressure. Containment is the short term goal of stopping the bleeding, meaning you reduce the immediate risk while you continue investigating. Eradication is the later step of removing the root cause, such as fixing a vulnerability, removing malicious changes, or correcting a bad configuration. Recovery is restoring normal operations safely and verifying that the system can be trusted again. Beginners sometimes want to jump straight to eradication, but if you do that before containment, you may lose evidence or allow harm to continue while you chase the perfect fix. In A I incidents, the system can be connected to many services, so a root cause fix might take time, but containment actions can often be taken quickly. Containment buys you time, and time is what you need to investigate with care.

A practical way to think about A I containment is to ask two questions: who can interact with the system, and what can the system interact with. Who can interact includes users, service accounts, automated processes, and external integrations that send requests. What the system can interact with includes data sources, tools, downstream systems, and channels where outputs are delivered. Many A I incidents involve misuse of these interactions, such as a user extracting sensitive data through prompts or an integration pulling private data into the model unexpectedly. Containment reduces the number of active interaction paths and reduces the privileges on the remaining paths. The goal is to shrink the incident surface area, meaning fewer ways for the incident to spread, while still keeping enough functionality to support investigation and critical operations.

Limiting access is often the fastest and most effective containment lever because it can be applied quickly and reversed if needed. In practice, access limiting can include disabling or suspending a suspicious account, reducing privileges for an account that may be compromised, or narrowing access to a smaller group of known trusted users while investigation continues. It can also include limiting access based on network location, time of day, or application interface, depending on what patterns were observed. A beginner should understand that access limiting is not a punishment; it is a safety measure that reduces risk while facts are gathered. If there is a chance that an attacker is using a stolen credential, continuing to allow broad access is like leaving a door open while you debate whether someone broke in. Fast access limiting is often the difference between a contained event and a widespread incident.

Another key containment lever is restricting what kinds of requests are allowed, because misuse often shows up in certain prompt patterns or certain types of content. If an incident involves attempts to extract sensitive data, containment might include blocking certain categories of requests or requiring additional verification for them. If the incident involves unsafe outputs, containment might include tightening policy enforcement so the system refuses more aggressively or routes more outputs to review. If the incident involves file uploads, containment might include temporarily disabling uploads or limiting uploads to safe formats. These moves are not the final fix, but they reduce the chance that the same risky behavior repeats while investigation is underway. For beginners, it helps to remember that the safest containment actions are those that are targeted to the observed risk story rather than broad shutdowns that create unnecessary disruption.

Stopping risky flows is the other half of containment, and flows are the movement of data and actions through the A I pipeline. A flow can be a prompt entering the system, a data source being queried, an output being sent to a messaging channel, or a downstream system being updated based on model output. When an incident is active, you want to identify which flows could cause immediate harm and restrict or pause them. For example, if the A I system is connected to a sensitive database, and you suspect data leakage, a fast containment step could be cutting off the model’s ability to query that database until you understand the exposure. If the A I system writes results into customer facing content, and outputs may be unsafe, you might pause that publishing flow so risky content does not reach the public. Stopping a flow can feel extreme, but it can be done in a controlled way by isolating the risky connection while leaving other functions intact.

A particularly common A I incident pattern involves sensitive data being introduced into the model context through integrations. That might happen when the system automatically retrieves records, emails, or documents to answer a user request, and the retrieval logic is too permissive. In this case, containment focuses on limiting what data can be retrieved, narrowing search scope, or temporarily disabling retrieval features. Another pattern involves model outputs being forwarded or stored in ways that expand exposure, such as sending outputs to external recipients or storing outputs in shared locations. Containment then focuses on limiting output destinations, limiting external sharing, and restricting access to stored outputs. Beginners should see that containment is often about constraining data movement, not about changing the model itself. If data cannot flow into or out of risky places, the impact of misuse drops immediately.

Containment must be fast, but it must also be careful, because poorly chosen containment can create new problems. One risk is destroying evidence, such as wiping logs or resetting systems without capturing what happened. Another risk is causing outages that disrupt critical services unnecessarily, which can harm users and erode trust. A third risk is tipping off an attacker in a way that causes them to accelerate or hide their tracks, although in many environments safety still comes first. The best containment actions are those that are reversible, traceable, and designed to preserve evidence. This is why it matters to document what containment actions were taken and when, because later you need to know which actions changed the environment. For beginners, the lesson is that containment is a controlled clamp, not a random scramble.

A useful containment mindset is to favor layered restrictions that can be escalated if needed. You might start by limiting access for the suspicious account and increasing monitoring, then tighten request filters for risky patterns, then pause specific integrations that involve sensitive data. If the risk appears broader, you can then restrict access to the system more widely or temporarily disable the affected feature. Layered containment avoids jumping straight to a total shutdown unless the harm is severe and immediate. It also allows you to test whether containment is working by observing whether the suspicious behavior stops after each step. This stepwise approach is especially helpful in A I incidents because different components may be involved, and you want to isolate which component is contributing to harm. Beginners should understand that containment is not one action, it is a sequence of increasingly strong moves guided by evidence.

During containment, coordination and communication matter because multiple teams may need to act quickly. Security responders may need engineers to disable an integration, identity teams to restrict access, and operations teams to monitor system health. Executives may need to approve a high impact containment action, such as disabling a widely used A I service. Clear communication ensures the right people know what is being changed and why, and it reduces the chance of conflicting actions. It also prevents well meaning helpers from making changes that undermine containment, like re enabling a paused feature because they think it was an accidental outage. Even for beginners, it is important to recognize that containment is a team sport, and teams need shared facts and shared decisions. Good containment includes disciplined documentation so everyone stays aligned.

As we close, remember that containment is about limiting immediate harm by shrinking the incident’s pathways, especially pathways of access and data flow. In A I incidents, limiting access means narrowing who can use the system and what privileges they have, while stopping risky flows means pausing or restricting the data sources, integrations, and output channels that could spread harm. Fast containment buys time for investigation and reduces the window in which damage can grow. The best containment actions are targeted to the observed risk story, reversible when possible, and designed to preserve evidence rather than destroy it. Containment is not the final fix, but it is the protective shield that keeps the incident from expanding while you work toward eradication and safe recovery. When you understand containment as controlled restriction rather than panic shutdown, you can respond quickly without losing stability or credibility.