Digital Forensics and Incident Response (DFIR) Services

DFIR combines two disciplines that work on the same incident from different ends. Incident response stops an active attack: isolating affected systems, evicting the attacker, and restoring operations. Digital forensics establishes what actually happened: how the attacker got in, what they reached, what they took, and whether they are really gone. Run separately, they undercut each other, because containment destroys evidence and investigation stalls while the attacker stays live. Run together, containment and evidence preservation happen in parallel.

Incident response is about the present: stop it, contain it, get back online. Digital forensics is about the past: reconstruct what happened, with evidence that holds up. The practical difference shows in sequencing. Reimage a machine immediately and you have recovered fast but destroyed the telemetry that proves eradication, and without proof of eradication every restore is a gamble. A DFIR engagement sequences both so neither compromises the other.

The NIST framework defines preparation, detection and analysis, containment, eradication and recovery, and post incident activity. In practice we run six phases: Engage, Contain, Investigate, Eradicate, Recover, Harden. The split matters because eradication and recovery are separate decisions. You can only recover onto infrastructure you have proven is clean, and organizations that collapse those two steps usually end up doing the whole job twice.

In the first hour: isolate affected systems at the network layer, protect identity and backup infrastructure, and establish out of band communications on the assumption that email and chat are compromised. Over the following days: reconstruct how the attacker got in and what they reached, determine whether data left the environment, remove persistence, and verify eradication before restoration begins. Throughout: document everything to a standard breach counsel, carriers, and regulators can rely on.

As soon as you suspect an intrusion you can't fully scope internally. The most expensive mistakes happen in the first hour, before anyone external is involved, and both of the common ones are self inflicted. Under isolation: triaging host by host while the attacker is still live, so re encryption hits systems you have already restored. Over destruction: reimaging immediately and in arbitrary order, destroying the evidence needed to prove eradication. Calling early costs a scoping conversation. Calling late costs weeks.

Our triage team is available 24/7/365. For active incidents we begin remote containment within 30 minutes of engagement on average. Complex environments and on site requirements extend that, and we coordinate next business day deployment where physical access is required.

We perform incident driven digital forensics: investigating, containing, and recovering from active and recent security incidents. We do not provide litigation support, expert witness testimony, eDiscovery, consumer or personal device examinations, or traditional data recovery for failed or physically damaged hardware. Where an incident later becomes a legal matter, we hand our findings and documentation to your counsel.

Enforce isolation aggressively but deliberately. Sever network connectivity at switch ports, VLANs, and the VPN concentrator rather than powering systems off. Pull network cables, not power cords. Machines mid encryption are an exception, but a powered off machine loses memory evidence you will need. Isolate domain controllers and backup repositories first, and verify your crown jewels are out of reach. Then contact IR counsel and a response firm on an out of band channel, assuming email and Teams are compromised.

It depends on whether you have a verified, clean, restorable recovery path, and that is a question evidence answers, not instinct. Two things are worth knowing before deciding. Payment for deletion is unverifiable by construction: when law enforcement dismantled LockBit's infrastructure in February 2024, they found data belonging to victims who had paid specifically for its deletion. And where a decryptor is delivered, it only addresses encryption. It does nothing about data already taken. We exhaust recovery options first and bring in negotiation only when it is the remaining path.

The nature of the incident changes. Exfiltration is no longer suspected, it is confirmed, and the leverage event has already happened. It stops being a containment problem and becomes a notification and harm reduction one. Preserve evidence first: capture the listing, timestamps, and samples of the published data for counsel. Then analyze which notification clocks are already running, since GDPR's 72 hours, state breach laws, HIPAA, GLBA, and the SEC's four business day rule all trigger differently. Assume the data is permanently public and plan from there.

The bottleneck is almost never data restoration. It is trust. Four things drive the long cases: unproven eradication, where scope and root cause aren't confirmed, so nothing can be safely restored; backup reality, meaning untested backups, encrypted backups, or restore throughput nobody ever measured; application interdependency, where getting a server back is fast but getting a business owner to certify that the ERP and its data are correct is not; and decision latency, where insurance approval, counsel review, and executive indecision routinely consume more wall clock time than any technical task.

No. We take emergency engagements with no prior relationship and no retainer minimum. A retainer changes the starting position rather than the availability: pre agreed terms, pre scoped environment knowledge, and a faster start because contracting is already done. For MSPs and organizations with carrier requirements, that is usually worth the difference.

Yes, routinely, at the direction of breach counsel. Our engagement structure, documentation standards, and communication protocols are built for privileged work, and we establish the privilege posture during the Engage phase rather than retrofitting it later.

Engagements follow the NIST CSF lifecycle with playbooks mapped to NIST SP 800-61. Our incident management procedures align with ISO 27035, and our internal ISMS follows ISO 27001 controls. Healthcare engagements incorporate HIPAA breach notification requirements, PHI exposure assessment, and HHS reporting timelines from day one. Payment card investigations follow PCI DSS Requirement 12.10.

Yes. MSPs and MSSPs engage us as white label DFIR capability, with a multi tenant console for managing response across a client base, partner SLAs with defined response and escalation, co branded reporting, and volume pricing built for managed delivery.

Sequencing and accountability. With separate vendors, containment and evidence preservation compete. The IR firm wants the attacker out now, the forensics firm wants the evidence intact, and the client arbitrates during the worst week of their year. One engagement, one team, one platform covers containment through recovery, with a single case owner and no gaps between the containment record and the forensic record.