What businesses do in the first 72 hours after an incident frequently determines whether it becomes a contained event or a prolonged crisis. Most of what they do is wrong.
The most common response to a breach is to patch the immediate symptom and move on. Restore the backup. Reset the passwords. Reinstall the OS. Declare the incident closed.
This approach fails because it treats the symptom as the problem. The breach was not the problem — it was the outcome of a problem. The poorly configured firewall, the flat network with no segmentation, the default passwords, the unpatched hardware — those are still there after the restoration.
And the attacker may still be in your network. The average dwell time before detection is 200+ days. A restoration that doesn't include a thorough forensic review frequently leaves active access intact. The same breach happens again within months.
If you restore without investigating, the vulnerability that allowed the breach is still present. The next attack — or the same attacker returning — finds the same door open.
Sophisticated attackers create multiple persistence mechanisms. Resetting the obvious credentials often misses backdoors, scheduled tasks, or compromised accounts that aren't front-facing.
For businesses handling customer data, healthcare records, or financial information, the longer an incident goes unaddressed — and the less documentation exists — the greater the regulatory exposure.
Our post-incident process starts with finding what's still in your environment — not just what caused the initial breach. We conduct a forensic review of the network, identify all active access paths, and document what the attacker had visibility into.
From there, we don't just restore — we rebuild. The network design that allowed the breach is corrected. Firewall rules are reviewed and restructured. Credentials are audited across every system. Monitoring is configured so the same event triggers an alert instead of going undetected.
The goal is a network that's not just recovered — it's more secure than it was before the incident, with documentation to demonstrate that to any regulatory body that asks.
Days — average time an attacker is inside a network before detection. A restoration without forensic review leaves them there.
Average cost of a small business breach. Most of that cost is not the initial incident — it's the incomplete response that allows it to continue.
Don't wait. Every hour after a breach matters. We assess what's in your environment before you begin restoration.