Incident Response

When a breach happens, every minute counts. Our expert IR team provides rapid containment, forensic investigation, and recovery to get you back on track.

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Services

IR Services

Emergency Response

24/7 incident response for active breaches - containment, eradication, and recovery to minimize damage and restore operations fast.

Digital Forensics

Forensic investigation including disk imaging, memory analysis, log correlation, and chain-of-custody evidence preservation for legal proceedings.

Ransomware Response

Specialized ransomware handling - encryption analysis, decryption assessment, negotiation guidance, and secure recovery from backup systems.

Breach Assessment

Post-breach impact analysis - data exposure scope, regulatory notification requirements, and affected party identification.

IR Plan Development

Custom incident response plan development, tabletop exercises, playbook creation, and team training for organizational readiness.

Retainer Services

Pre-negotiated IR retainers with guaranteed SLAs - ensuring rapid response when incidents occur with pre-staged tooling and access.

What We Do

What Incident Response Looks Like in Cloud Environments

Cloud incidents are structurally different from traditional on-premises breaches. Attackers move through IAM role assumptions, cross-account trust relationships, and API-layer lateral movement rather than network pivots. Evidence is ephemeral: compute instances are terminated, logs roll over, and CloudTrail records the API calls but not always the downstream impact. The first hours of a cloud incident require practitioners who understand these mechanics, not a team applying a generic IR playbook to an environment they have never seen before.

Our cloud incident response work covers the full investigation layer: CloudTrail analysis to reconstruct the attack timeline, IAM policy examination to identify the privilege escalation path, VPC flow log correlation to map lateral movement, and memory and disk forensics on affected instances before they are terminated. We use tools with direct production experience behind them: Volatility for memory analysis, Autopsy and Sleuth Kit for disk forensics, YARA for malware identification, and MISP for IOC correlation. Chain-of-custody evidence preservation is built into the process from the start for organizations where regulatory notification or legal proceedings are a possibility.

IR retainers pre-stage the access, tooling, and environment knowledge we need to respond immediately when an incident occurs. Organizations that engage an IR firm for the first time during an active breach spend the first several hours granting access and explaining their architecture. Organizations on retainer skip that entirely. Response time and investigation quality are both materially better when we already know your environment before the incident starts.

Process

Response Phases

Triage & Containment

Rapid assessment and immediate containment to stop active threats and prevent further spread.

Investigation & Analysis

Deep-dive forensics to understand attack vectors, timeline, and full scope of compromise.

Eradication & Recovery

Remove all attacker presence and restore systems to a known-good state securely.

Post-Incident Review

Lessons learned, root cause analysis, and recommendations to prevent recurrence.

IR Readiness

Incident Response for Cloud, Healthcare, and Regulated Organizations

Cloud-Native Environments

AWS, GCP, and Azure incidents require forensic capabilities built for cloud architecture. We reconstruct attack timelines from CloudTrail and Cloud Audit Logs, analyze IAM role assumption chains to identify the initial access vector, review VPC flow logs for lateral movement, and preserve forensic evidence from affected instances before the environment is modified. Our investigation methodology is designed for the ephemeral, API-driven nature of cloud infrastructure rather than adapted from on-premises playbooks.

Healthcare and HIPAA Breach Response

Healthcare organizations and business associates experiencing a breach involving PHI face both an IR problem and a regulatory deadline. HIPAA requires covered entities to notify affected individuals within 60 days of discovering a breach, with additional notification timelines applying to HHS and media depending on the number of individuals affected. We conduct the forensic investigation and breach impact assessment in parallel, producing the documentation your legal and compliance teams need to determine notification obligations while containment and eradication are still underway.

Ransomware and Extortion Response

Ransomware response requires decisions that are time-sensitive and consequential: whether to engage with threat actors, whether backups are recoverable and unaffected, and whether exfiltration occurred before encryption. We assess the encryption implementation to determine whether decryption without the key is feasible, verify the integrity and completeness of backup systems before recovery begins, and provide negotiation guidance grounded in current threat actor behavior. Recovery from known-good backups is always the preferred path when the backup infrastructure is confirmed unaffected by the attack.

FAQ

Common Questions About Incident Response

What is an IR retainer and do we need one?

An IR retainer is a pre-negotiated agreement that guarantees response capacity and establishes the access, tooling, and environment knowledge required to respond immediately when an incident occurs. Organizations that engage an IR firm during an active breach spend the first several hours on access provisioning and architecture explanation before investigation can begin. A retainer eliminates that delay. It also typically includes proactive services such as IR plan development, tabletop exercises, and periodic environment reviews that improve readiness before any incident occurs. For organizations that handle PHI, payment card data, or federal information, a retainer is the responsible baseline.

How long does a cloud incident response investigation take?

Initial containment is typically achievable within hours of engagement depending on the nature and scope of the incident. Full forensic investigation, including attack timeline reconstruction, root cause identification, and complete scope of compromise determination, typically runs one to three weeks for a contained incident in a single cloud environment. Multi-cloud incidents, incidents involving persistent access over extended periods, and incidents where the initial access vector is unclear take longer. We provide interim findings throughout the investigation so your legal, compliance, and leadership teams can make decisions without waiting for the final report.

What evidence is preserved during a cloud forensic investigation?

Evidence collection in cloud environments covers CloudTrail logs for API activity reconstruction, VPC flow logs for network traffic analysis, system logs from affected instances, memory captures from running instances before termination, disk images from affected volumes, IAM policy state at the time of the incident, and any available application or database logs relevant to the scope of compromise. We preserve chain-of-custody documentation for all evidence from collection through analysis, which is required for regulatory notification submissions and is essential if legal proceedings become necessary. The evidence package is delivered alongside the final investigation report.

How does incident response relate to HIPAA breach notification requirements?

HIPAA requires covered entities to notify affected individuals within 60 days of discovering a breach of unsecured PHI, with additional requirements for HHS notification and media notification when the breach affects more than 500 individuals in a state. The forensic investigation determines whether a breach occurred, what PHI was accessed or exfiltrated, and how many individuals are affected. These findings directly drive the notification obligations. We structure the investigation to produce the breach impact assessment your legal team needs to make notification decisions as early as possible, rather than waiting until the full investigation closes.

What is the difference between IR readiness and a tabletop exercise?

IR readiness is the overall state of your organization's preparedness to detect, contain, investigate, and recover from a security incident. It encompasses your IR plan, your detection capabilities, your forensic tooling, your communication protocols, and your recovery procedures. A tabletop exercise is a structured discussion-based simulation in which your team works through a specific incident scenario to test the IR plan and identify gaps in roles, decisions, and communications without the pressure of a real event. Tabletop exercises are a component of IR readiness, not a substitute for it. Organizations with no IR plan, no detection capability, and no forensic tooling will not improve their readiness from a tabletop alone.

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