Forcepoint DLP Incident Management — Triage, Severity & Remediation

① The incident queue — where matches become work

Every policy match lands as an incident in the Forcepoint Security Manager, in the Data Security module at Main > Reporting > Data Loss Prevention (with parallel queues for Mobile Devices and Discovery). The queue is a table you can sort, group and filter by any column, add custom columns via Table Properties, and preview per row — selecting an incident opens full details in the lower pane.

One thing to know for production and interviews: the DLP and Mobile views show a rolling time window (typically the last 3 or 7 days; Mobile adds 30; Discovery has no limit). The default sort is incident time — but timestamp order is exactly the wrong way to triage. The dangerous case is rarely the newest one, which is why risk-based ordering matters.

② Severity, assignment and escalation

Forcepoint DLP uses three severity levels: High (significant, broad impact), Medium (moderate, should be reviewed) and Low (insignificant). Severity is auto-calculated from the prescribed (policy-rule) severity plus the number of matched violations. More matches push an incident up. Analysts can override via Workflow > Change Severity for selected or all-filtered incidents.

Assign, status, escalate

The Workflow button drives the lifecycle: Assign/Unassign an owner, Change Status, Change Severity, Ignore, Tag (for later filtering), Add Comments (logged to incident history) and Delete. For business context, distributed workflow lets notifications embed action links so data owners and managers respond by email without logging into the console. Forcepoint's escalation model: levels 1–2 audit/notify, level 3 block plus user coaching, levels 4–5 escalate to the IR team.

③ Forensics and remediation — close it cleanly

The details pane is your forensic record. It shows the breached policy/rule, what content matched, the source (who), the destination, the channel (web, email, endpoint, cloud), the action taken and the status — answering what data left, who sent it, which channel and the likely intent. You triage from evidence, not a hunch.

Remediation actions

For email incidents you can Release from quarantine, Encrypt on release, or Validate user before releasing (only a genuine recipient may release); release flows through the configured gateway (Protector MTA or Forcepoint Email Security). Remediation scripts let a policy engine, endpoint agent or management server auto-respond to specific incident types. The judgement call: never blindly Release something that looks like real exfiltration — keep it quarantined and escalate.

④ Reporting, RBAC and Risk-Adaptive Protection

Built-in reports turn the queue into evidence. Violations by Severity & Action (the 'All Violations Severity & Action, last 7 days' report) is ideal for finding high-severity incidents that were blocked, alongside compliance reporting and a unified dashboard across web, email, endpoint and cloud. Delegated administration controls who can do what: an Incident Manager works incidents without editing policy, an Auditor reads, and a Super Administrator owns the system.

Risk-based prioritisation

This is the modern answer. Incident Risk Ranking groups related incidents from the same user/classification into cases and assigns each a 0–10 risk score (matches, transaction size, content, breached policy, date/time, anomalies, data sensitivity), classifying them as Suspected data theft, Possibly broken business process, or Uncategorized. Risk-Adaptive Protection uses 130+ Indicators of Behavior to escalate enforcement automatically as a user's risk climbs — so you work the most dangerous cases first, not the newest.