Digital Forensics &
Incident Response (DFIR)
When a breach occurs, your response dictates your legal liability and operational survival.
Investigate suspected compromise, authorize containment, preserve available evidence, and plan recovery with your leadership, IT team, counsel and insurer.
Requests sent with the incident form go to an advisor, who will contact you to arrange next steps. To talk now, call +1 (214) 617-2080
"The perimeter has been breached."
What you do next determines how much this costs you. Do not reboot your servers. Do not format your hard drives. You need a disciplined plan to preserve the evidence and remove the attacker's access.
The Danger of a Botched Response
The worst damage from a cyberattack often comes after the initial breach, from rushed decisions made under pressure before evidence is preserved.
Here is the operational and legal friction our DFIR practice is built to reduce.
Destroying Forensic Evidence
When IT teams reboot compromised servers or run standard antivirus scans during an active breach, they destroy the volatile memory and forensic artifacts that your legal counsel and insurance carriers need to process your claim.
We legally preserve the evidence before acting.
Restoring Before Eradicating
If you restore from backups without finding and closing the way the attacker got in, they can come straight back.
We hunt for persistence mechanisms and reverse shells, and report what the available evidence shows before you bring operations back.
Business Email Compromise (BEC):
The Wire Fraud Nightmare
Threat actors sit silently in Microsoft 365 inboxes, intercepting invoices and redirecting massive wire transfers to offshore accounts.
Under your authorization we contain access to the tenant, trace unauthorized forwarding rules, and map what the available logs show was accessed or sent out.
Extortion & Ransom Negotiation:
Dealing with Threat Cartels
Communicating with ransomware cartels requires specialized tradecraft. If data is stolen, we step in alongside our specialized partners to handle threat actor communications, buy time, and securely evaluate your recovery options.
Regulatory Reporting Failures:
Navigating the Disclosures
When sensitive data is breached, you have strict, legally mandated deadlines to notify regulators and victims. We provide the precise, factual forensic reports your legal counsel needs to file compliant notifications and avoid massive fines.
Operational Paralysis
Standard IT providers freeze during a major incident. Our DFIR team brings military-grade structure to the chaos, executing parallel workstreams to simultaneously investigate the breach, rebuild infrastructure, and get your business back online safely.
Methodical Recovery. Defensible Forensics.
We don’t guess, and we don't act on panic.
We follow a strict, intelligence-community framework to neutralize the adversary, minimize your downtime, and establish a legally defensible chain of custody.
Threat Containment
The brain of your Zero Trust architecture.
We immediately deploy endpoint detection agents (EDR) and network telemetry tools to identify infected machines and surgically isolate them from the core network without destroying forensic artifacts.
You cannot recover while the attacker is still actively mapping your network. Containment halts the lateral movement, protecting your remaining healthy assets.
Malicious IP & Domain Blocking
Immediate Network Micro-segmentation
Compromised Account Freezing
Legacy Authentication Disablement
Digital Forensics & Investigation
Establish the chain of events.
Our forensic engineers capture memory, analyze firewall and cloud logs, and examine malware samples. We work to identify "Patient Zero," the attack vector, and what data was accessed or exfiltrated, as far as the available evidence allows.
"We think they got in through the VPN" is not a legally acceptable answer. We provide the hard evidence required by your legal team, board of directors, and insurance carriers.
Memory Dump & Log Analysis
"Patient Zero" Identification
Lateral Movement & Exfiltration Mapping
(IOC) Extraction
Eradication
Neutralize the adversary’s footprint.
We hunt for artifacts left by the attacker. With your authorization we remove malicious executables, delete unauthorized admin accounts, force password resets, and patch the exploited vulnerabilities.
If you skip eradication, the attacker can walk back in. We confirm the known access paths are closed before recovery begins.
Backdoor & Rootkit Removal
Malicious Script & Payload Deletion
Global Identity & Password Resets
Rogue Firewall Rule Purging
Secure Rebuild & Recovery
Bring the business back online.
We work with your IT team to safely restore data from immutable backups. Before any server is reintroduced to production, it is rigorously scanned and secured behind a newly deployed Zero Trust architecture.
We don't just put you back where you started. We build you back stronger. We ensure the infrastructure is highly resilient against secondary attacks before restoring connectivity.
Immutable Backup Restoration
Clean-Room System Staging
Zero Trust Architecture Deployment
Phishing-Resistant MFA Enforcement
Post-Incident Reporting
The boardroom debrief.
We translate the technical forensic investigation into a comprehensive executive report. This document details the timeline of the attack, the financial impact, and the strategic road map to prevent a recurrence.
Attackers specifically target administrative accounts. By ensuring nobody has 24/7 administrative rights, you remove the ultimate prize from the adversary's reach while still allowing employees to perform necessary updates securely.
Executive Timeline Summary
Regulatory & Legal Disclosure Support
Financial Impact Assessment
Strategic Security Roadmap
Proactive Incident Readiness
Prepare before the breach.
If you are not actively dealing with an incident, we write your formal Incident Response Plan (IRP) and conduct executive tabletop exercises to simulate a breach and test your team’s readiness.
The worst time to figure out who to call is when the network goes down. Proactive readiness turns a catastrophic event into a manageable operational disruption.
Formal Incident Response Plan (IRP)
Custom Tabletop Attack Scenarios
Executive Readiness Scoring
Crisis Communication Templates
Biometric Access Enablement
Order out of Chaos
Identity control is not enough if your endpoint can still execute malware. Our unique Zero Trust methodology blends Microsoft Identity with Application execution control for ultimate resilience.
Strategic Rebuilding
We do not just investigate the breach; we are enterprise cloud architects. Once the threat is contained, we can rebuild affected infrastructure to a modern, zero-trust standard under a separately scoped project, reducing the chance of a repeat.
Cyber Insurance Alignment
We speak the language of insurance carriers and breach coaches. Our strict adherence to forensic chain-of-custody protocols ensures your claim isn't denied due to spoliation of evidence.
Elite Adversarial Tradecraft
You are fighting organized crime; you need responders who understand their tactics. Our analysts use intelligence-grade tools to outmaneuver the adversary and secure your perimeter.
Defensible Legal Posture
Our final reports are built for the boardroom and the courtroom. We give your legal counsel the definitive, factual clarity they need to navigate regulatory disclosures without assuming unnecessary liability.
Do Not Trust Your Local MSP
to Investigate a Breach
Standard IT providers are built to maintain networks, not investigate advanced persistent threats.
When an MSP encounters a breach, their instinct is often to blindly format servers or restore from backups immediately. This destroys the evidence, violates your cyber insurance policy, and leaves the original vulnerability wide open.
Cloudskope’s DFIR practice consists of incident commanders, forensic analysts, and former U.S. Intelligence operators. We bring a structured, methodical response to your crisis. We take command of the incident, legally preserve the digital crime scene, and systematically hunt the adversary out of your network before rebuilding your infrastructure.
When to Engage DFIR
Do not wait for a full network collapse.
Contact Cloudskope immediately if you experience any of the following critical indicators of compromise.
Post-Ransomware Recovery
Files have been encrypted and operations are halted. You need an elite team to assess the damage, clear the environment, and securely restore operations.
Business Email Compromise (BEC)
You discover unauthorized forwarding rules in Microsoft 365, or a client reports wiring money to a fraudulent account based on an email from your executive team.
The FBI/CISA Notification
You receive a formal notification from federal law enforcement or your cloud provider informing you that your network is communicating with known malicious infrastructure.
Proactive Executive Readiness
ou want to prepare your leadership team before a disaster strikes by building a formal Incident Response Plan and executing a simulated Tabletop Exercise.
The Supply Chain Compromise
A critical third-party software vendor or your current Managed Service Provider (MSP) was just breached.
You need an independent compromise assessment to show your board, clients and insurance carrier what the evidence says about whether the adversary reached your internal infrastructure.
The Malicious Insider
You suspect a departing executive, a disgruntled IT administrator, or a highly privileged user is actively exfiltrating corporate data or sabotaging systems.
You need a covert, legally defensible forensic investigation to lock them out and secure the evidence before the damage becomes permanent.
Frequently Asked Questions
Answers to the most common questions about scope, process, and what happens after the audit.
Do Not Face the Adversary Alone
Handling a cyberattack requires elite tradecraft, legal precision, and methodical operational control. Stop guessing and stop destroying the evidence.
Let Cloudskope’s DFIR commanders investigate the breach, eradicate the adversary, and bring your business safely back online.