New Incident Response Taxonomy Maps Factors That Shape Cybersecurity Readiness

A new arXiv preprint is trying to bring order to one of cybersecurity’s more fragmented research areas: the factors that influence how organizations prepare for and execute incident response.

The paper, SoK: A Taxonomy for Cybersecurity Incident Response Influence Factors, was posted to arXiv on July 2, 2026. It is authored by Thomas Biege, Marius Brockhoff, Jonas Kaspereit, Fabian Ising, Lea Gröber, and Sebastian Schinzel.

The authors say the work is based on a review of 417 academic papers and 40 non-scientific publications. The literature window runs from 1999 through mid-2024, giving the study a long historical span rather than a narrow snapshot of recent practice.

What the paper proposes

The central output is the Cybersecurity Incident Response Influencing Factor Taxonomy, or CIR-IF Taxonomy. The authors present it as a structured way to organize the many factors that drive or shape incident response.

That matters because incident response research cuts across multiple disciplines. Technical controls, human behavior, organizational processes, training, governance, and management decisions all affect how a response unfolds. In a field like that, terminology and emphasis often vary from study to study, making the broader literature hard to compare.

The paper frames the problem as fragmentation. Rather than introducing a new tool, incident, or policy change, it offers a synthesis of existing knowledge.

The abstract says the resulting taxonomy provides a richer and more rigorously organized view of the influences on incident response.

How the study was built

The scale of the review is one of the paper’s strongest signals. By combining 417 academic papers with 40 non-scientific publications, the authors appear to have tried to capture both formal research and practitioner-facing material.

The time span is also notable. Covering work from 1999 to mid-2024 suggests the authors were not only mapping the current literature, but also tracing how ideas about incident response preparedness and execution have developed over time.

That historical breadth gives the taxonomy a broader evidentiary base than a review limited to recent years. It also increases the chance that the framework reflects long-running themes in the field, not just short-term trends.

How it connects to existing frameworks

The paper does more than collect and classify source material. According to the abstract, the taxonomy was compared with seven established scientific frameworks.

It was also compared with elements from the NIST Cyber Security Framework as referenced in the incident response profile in NIST Special Publication 800-61r3. That puts the work in a standards context that many practitioners will recognize.

This comparison is important because it suggests the authors are trying to make CIR-IF usable alongside existing incident response guidance, not as an isolated academic exercise.

For researchers, that kind of cross-check can help show whether the taxonomy overlaps with established models or fills gaps they leave open. For practitioners, it may offer a more detailed map for preparedness reviews and internal planning.

Why it matters

The practical argument for the paper is straightforward. Incident response success depends on more than just tools or playbooks. It also depends on organizational readiness, communication, roles, experience, and the surrounding environment.

A taxonomy that organizes those influence factors can help explain why two organizations with similar security stacks may respond differently to the same kind of event.

It may also help researchers identify underexplored areas. If the field already has a broad body of work, a clear taxonomy can reveal which factors are repeatedly studied and which ones remain thinly covered.

That makes the paper potentially useful as a research map, a teaching aid, and a starting point for future empirical work.

Who is behind it

The listed authors are Thomas Biege, Marius Brockhoff, Jonas Kaspereit, Fabian Ising, Lea Gröber, and Sebastian Schinzel.

At this stage, the available evidence is limited to the arXiv preprint and its abstract. No independent reporting or institutional announcement was included in the research packet, so the verified facts stop at the publication itself and the claims made in the abstract.

That means the full paper may still contain additional detail on the taxonomy categories, evaluation method, and practical recommendations. But those specifics were not visible in the material used here.

What to watch next

The most useful next step is the full paper, which may define the taxonomy in more detail than the abstract and explain how the categories were derived.

It will also be worth watching for later conference, workshop, or journal placement if the paper is tied to a venue beyond arXiv.

A separate follow-up would be commentary from incident-response practitioners or NIST-adjacent researchers on whether the taxonomy is useful in real-world preparedness work.

For now, the paper stands as a fresh synthesis of incident response research and a new attempt to make a sprawling literature easier to organize, compare, and apply.