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CISM Practice Question: After an incident is contained and eradicated,…
After an incident is contained and eradicated, the incident response team conducts a post-incident review. Which of the following is the PRIMARY objective of this review?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse a secondary outcome (like updating policies) with the primary objective, failing to recognize that the review's core purpose is process improvement, not documentation or blame.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Identify process improvements
The primary objective of a post-incident review is to identify process improvements that enhance the organization's incident response capabilities. This aligns with the CISM focus on continuous improvement, ensuring that lessons learned are captured and applied to prevent recurrence or improve future response efficiency.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Update security policies
Why it's wrong here
Policy updates may follow, but they are an output of lessons learned rather than the review's primary objective, which is establishing root cause and corrective actions. Policy revision is the right focus when a compliance gap or audit finding, not an incident, drives the exercise.
- ✗
Determine the financial impact
Why it's wrong here
Financial impact feeds the business case but is one input, not the review's purpose; the review exists to identify root cause and improve future response. Costing an incident is the correct focus when justifying security spend or reporting loss exposure to management.
- ✗
Assign blame to the responsible parties
Why it's wrong here
Blame attribution undermines the blameless culture that encourages honest disclosure, and it produces no control improvement. Identifying responsible parties is appropriate in a disciplinary or legal investigation, where accountability, not process learning, is the stated aim.
- ✓
Identify process improvements
Why this is correct
The post-incident review exists to convert lessons from the response into corrective actions, strengthening future capability. Identifying process improvements satisfies that objective by addressing gaps in detection, escalation and containment, rather than assigning blame or merely documenting the event.
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JA
Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This CISM practice question is part of Courseiva's free ISACA certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the CISM exam.