Incident Response & Digital Forensics
When minutes matter, we help you detect, contain, and recover—then harden so it doesn’t happen again. Our IR combines playbooks, forensics, and remediation sprints with clear comms for execs and auditors.
What we do in an incident
We operate as an extension of your team: coordinate triage, contain spread, collect forensics, and guide remediation. We keep stakeholders informed with plain-language updates and give engineering clear, actionable tasks.
Operational outcomes
- Time-to-contain and time-to-recover improved
- Evidence preserved and chain-of-custody documented
- Root cause verified and remediated
Assurance outcomes
- Audit-ready timelines and artifacts
- Executive summaries for boards and customers
- Updated playbooks and control gaps addressed
Preparedness playbooks
We establish the basics so the first 60 minutes are decisive.
Runbooks
- Containment decision trees
- Evidence handling & volatile capture
- Escalation thresholds & paging rotations
Access & tooling
- Privileged access break-glass flows
- IR vault for keys & credentials
- Golden images for forensic VMs
Tabletops
- Quarterly ransomware & BEC scenarios
- Cloud identity pivot drills
- After-action reviews & metrics
Incident lifecycle
1) Detection & triage
Validate signal from SIEM/EDR, classify severity, and form the response cell. Contain noisy alerts while preserving evidence.
2) Containment
Isolate hosts, revoke tokens/keys, disable compromised users, and block C2/exfil paths; prioritize blast-radius reduction.
3) Forensics
Acquire volatile and persistence artifacts, reconstruct timelines, and identify initial access and lateral movement.
4) Eradication
Remove malware, reset credentials, rotate keys, and close misconfigurations & persistence mechanisms.
5) Recovery
Rebuild clean images, restore data, re-enable services, and increase monitoring; declare steady state.
6) Lessons & metrics
Post-incident review (PIR), RCA, control improvements, and metric updates (MTTD/MTTR; dwell time).
Digital forensics
Collection & acquisition
- Host images, memory captures, and volatile data
- Cloud logs (CloudTrail, Azure Activity, GCP Audit)
- Network telemetry, WAF/CDN logs, DNS, and proxy data
Analysis & timeline
- Initial access vector & privilege escalation
- Persistence mechanisms and C2 channels
- Exfil paths, encryption events, and data-at-risk
Stakeholder communications
Internal
Incident channel, exec briefings, legal & privacy coordination, and IT/engineering workstreams tracked in a shared board.
External
Customer notifications, regulator timelines, law enforcement engagement, and press guidelines.
Hardening after the incident
Identity & access
- MFA, FIDO2, conditional policies, privileged access workstations
- Key rotation, short-lived tokens, just-in-time admin
- Risk-based auth and session protections
Detection & response
- Coverage for critical telemetry gaps
- High-signal detections, triage playbooks, and auto-containment
- Regular tabletop drills and purple team exercises
Deliverables
- Executive summary & customer/regulator narrative
- Technical timeline and root cause analysis
- Evidence package (hashes, images, logs) with chain-of-custody
- Remediation tracker (CSV/Jira) and post-incident roadmap
- Retest/validation report
Sample status update
| Topic | Summary |
|---|---|
| Containment | Hosts isolated; tokens revoked; C2 blocked |
| Forensics | Memory images acquired; initial access identified |
| Remediation | Key rotation in progress; EDR coverage increased |
| Risks | Two systems pending isolation; watch for lateral movement |
Typical timeline
| Phase | Duration | Activities |
|---|---|---|
| Hot start | 0–24 hrs | Triage, contain, acquire evidence, secure access |
| Forensics | 2–7 days | Host/cloud analysis and timeline reconstruction |
| Remediation | 3–10 days | Key rotation, hardening, patching, re-imaging |
| Retest & PIR | 2–5 days | Validation, RCA, control updates |
Pricing / Engagement model
Hotline Retainer
- 24×7 on-call with defined SLAs
- Quarterly tabletops
- Hours banked for hot starts
Per‑Incident
- Fixed fee for defined scope
- Dedicated IR cell for duration
- Optional retest add‑on
Hybrid
- Small retainer + reduced incident fees
- Priority access to senior responders
- Annual roadmap reviews
FAQs
Will this disrupt business operations?
We stage changes, throttle actions, and coordinate windows with owners and SOC/NOC to minimize impact.
Can you coordinate with legal & privacy?
Yes—our comms plan integrates legal, privacy, HR, and PR stakeholders to meet notification obligations.
Do you support cloud‑native incidents?
Absolutely. We handle IAM/key misuse, workload compromises, and SaaS takeovers with cloud forensics.
What about ransomware?
We emphasize rapid containment, encrypted data triage, negotiation guidance (if needed), and restoration planning.