Which of the following best describes the standard sequence of actions in an incident response lifecycle?

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In incident response, you start by detecting the incident and assessing its severity to guide the level of urgency and actions. After that, containment is the priority to stop the incident from spreading or causing more damage. Once you’re contained, you address the immediate impact (mitigate) and then apply permanent fixes to underlying causes (patches, configuration changes, removing attacker access). Only after those steps do you restore services to normal operation. Finally, a post-incident review is conducted to learn from what happened and improve defenses for the future.

This sequence ensures you limit damage first, then eliminate root causes, recover safely, and learn from the incident. The alternatives either restore services too early, omit a dedicated fix step, or mix containment with mitigation in an illogical order.