Timely and effective incident response is key to managing the growing
frequency of cyberattacks. However, identifying the right response actions for
complex systems is a major technical challenge. A promising approach to
mitigate this challenge is to use the security knowledge embedded in large
language models (LLMs) to assist security operators during incident handling.
Recent research has demonstrated the potential of this approach, but current
methods are mainly based on prompt engineering of frontier LLMs, which is
costly and prone to hallucinations. We address these limitations by presenting
a novel way to use an LLM for incident response planning with reduced
hallucination. Our method includes three steps: fine-tuning, information
retrieval, and lookahead planning. We prove that our method generates response
plans with a bounded probability of hallucination and that this probability can
be made arbitrarily small at the expense of increased planning time under
certain assumptions. Moreover, we show that our method is lightweight and can
run on commodity hardware. We evaluate our method on logs from incidents
reported in the literature. The experimental results show that our method a)
achieves up to 22% shorter recovery times than frontier LLMs and b) generalizes
to a broad range of incident types and response actions.