Incident Response

Many of the most important decisions during a security incident must be made before complete information is available. Should a system be disconnected from the network? Should operations be paused? Should customers be informed? Are attackers still active? Has sensitive information been exposed?

Our Digital Forensics service helps organisations answer these questions. But when a security incident has occurred, response steps may need to begin before answers to those questions are fully available, and that is where our Incident Response service shines. Waiting for perfect information is rarely possible, yet acting too quickly can sometimes cause additional harm. We base our Incident Response service around balancing incomplete information with the need to take decisive action.

Incident response and digital forensics remain closely linked. Understanding how an attacker gained access, what systems they reached, what actions they performed, and whether they remain present is often critical to determining the appropriate response. Our Incident Response offering therefore draws heavily on our Digital Forensics capability. Investigation and response frequently proceed together, with information gathered during the investigation directly shaping containment, remediation, and recovery decisions.

A successful attack does not necessarily need to become a catastrophic one. An important objective of incident response is limiting the scope of an incident before it can spread further. Depending on the circumstances, this may involve isolating affected systems, disabling compromised accounts, restoring services from backups, removing malicious software, rebuilding infrastructure from trusted sources, or introducing temporary controls while a longer-term solution is developed.

We begin by moving quickly to understand and contain - isolating affected systems to stop the spread while taking care to preserve evidence and to avoid tipping off an attacker before we are ready to remove them. From there we work to eradicate the threat in full: identifying and removing footholds, persistence mechanisms, and malware. If reliably cleaning a system is difficult or impractical, we may opt to rebuild systems from the ground up instead. Then we help you recover - restoring systems safely, validating that they are genuinely clean, and monitoring closely for the attacker's attempt to return, which is common and which catches out organisations that declare victory too soon.

Security incidents affect people as much as technology. While technical containment and remediation are often necessary, organisations must also coordinate leadership, IT teams, staff, customers, suppliers, insurers, regulators, and even media exposure. As a consequence, successful incident response is not solely a technical exercise. It also depends on communication, decision-making, operational processes, and organisational resilience. Our Tabletop Exercise offering helps organisations prepare for precisely this challenge ahead of time; our Incident Response service is where we help you actually navigate it in practice. As with our security approach overall, our incident response approaches are holistic and help our clients adapt to both the technical and operational implications of an incident.

Every successful attack reveals something about the systems and processes it affected. Security incidents expose weaknesses that may not have been apparent during normal operation and often reveal unexpected interactions between technical systems and human processes. An important goal of incident response is improvement, rather than just recovery. Understanding why an incident occurred is critical for improving an organisation's security posture. An incident provides a unique view into how attackers actually interact with an organisation's systems. Understanding how an incident progressed provides an opportunity to reduce the likelihood or impact of future incidents - one that no audit or compliance exercise could offer.

The best incident response happens before an incident occurs. Organisations that have already considered how they will react to a breach are often able to respond faster, communicate more effectively, and recover more quickly. Our Incident Response offering therefore pairs naturally with our Tabletop Exercise and Breach Impact services. These engagements help organisations understand the consequences of potential attacks and develop confidence in their ability to respond before a real incident takes place.

Our Incident Response offerings focus on providing whatever is needed to support recovery and restoration from a security incident. Typically, this includes containment and remediation for affected computer systems, an assessment of impacted systems, assistance with response planning by leadership, analysis of lessons learned, and recommendations for future security improvements.