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Cybersecurity & Compliance

Digital Forensics & Incident Response

Post-incident investigation, containment, and reporting when something has gone wrong — understand what happened, limit the damage, and come away with clear evidence and lessons to prevent a repeat.

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Overview

What happens in the first hours of a breach

When you suspect a breach, the first hours matter and the wrong move can destroy evidence or make things worse. Digital forensics and incident response (DFIR) helps you respond in a structured way: contain the incident, understand its scope, preserve evidence properly, and recover. We help identify how the attacker got in and what they accessed, contain the affected systems while preserving forensic evidence, and reconstruct a timeline of what happened. The engagement produces a clear incident report — what occurred, what was and was not affected, and the concrete steps to close the gap that allowed it — written to be useful both to your technical team and to stakeholders who need a plain-language account. Where preparation is the priority rather than an active incident, we can also help you build an incident-response plan and runbooks so that if something does happen, your team already knows what to do.

What’s included

  • Structured containment that preserves forensic evidence
  • Scope analysis: how they got in and what was accessed
  • Timeline reconstruction of the incident
  • Clear incident report for technical and non-technical readers
  • Incident-response plan and runbook development
Who it's for

Who calls us mid-incident

  • Companies dealing with an active or suspected breach who need structured help before evidence is lost or overwritten
  • SMEs hit by ransomware that must decide what to restore, what to rebuild, and how the attacker got in
  • Organisations that must report an incident to regulators, insurers or customers and need a defensible factual account
  • Security and IT leaders who want an incident response plan and runbooks in place before anything actually happens
When you need it

Signals that mean it's time to call

  • Files across shared drives are encrypted and a ransom note has appeared, and nobody yet knows the entry point or scope
  • Endpoint or cloud alerts show suspicious activity, and the team needs to establish whether it is a real compromise
  • Fraudulent payments or mailbox rule changes suggest a business email compromise on a finance or executive account
  • A departing employee is suspected of taking data, and the evidence must be preserved properly for possible legal use
  • The organisation has no incident response plan, and leadership wants runbooks and roles agreed before an incident occurs
Deliverables

What you walk away with

Every engagement ends with something your team can act on — not a slide deck.

  • Containment actions taken and documented in a way that preserves forensic evidence rather than destroying it
  • Forensic images and preserved logs held under documented chain of custody
  • A reconstructed incident timeline covering initial access, activity observed, and systems affected
  • An incident report for both technical and non-technical readers, with root cause analysis where evidence supports it
  • A prioritised remediation and hardening plan, plus incident response runbooks where you need them
How it works

Containment, then investigation, then answers

The same predictable shape whether the work is an assessment or a build, so you always know what happens next.

  1. 1

    Discover

    We start by understanding your systems, goals, and constraints — scope, risk tolerance, and what success looks like — so the work is aimed at your actual problem, not a generic template.

  2. 2

    Assess or build

    For security work, we test and analyse against recognised standards. For development, we build in small, reviewable increments. Either way, you see progress early and can change direction.

  3. 3

    Report or ship

    You get clear, prioritised deliverables — a report your engineers can act on, or working software shipped to your environment — with the context to understand what was done and why.

  4. 4

    Support

    We stay available after delivery: retesting fixes, iterating on the product, and answering the questions that come up once real users and real traffic arrive.

FAQ

Incident Response — common questions

What should we do in the first hour of a suspected breach?

Isolate affected systems from the network but do not power them off, because memory holds evidence that is lost on shutdown. Stop deleting or reinstalling anything, preserve logs before retention windows expire, and record what you observe and when. Then contact us with what you know. Well-intentioned clean-up is the most common way evidence is destroyed before an investigation can start.

Can you tell us exactly who attacked us?

Usually not with certainty, and we will not claim otherwise. Attribution to a named group or individual is difficult even for national agencies, since infrastructure is rented, shared and deliberately obscured. What we can establish from evidence is far more useful to you: how they got in, what they accessed, how long they were present, and which gap to close. We report only what the evidence supports.

Can you recover our data after a ransomware attack?

Sometimes, but we cannot guarantee it and nobody honestly can. Recovery depends on whether viable backups exist, whether the ransomware variant has a known flaw, and what shadow copies or cloud versioning survived. We assess recovery options alongside containment, help you evaluate the risk of each path, and focus on rebuilding safely so the same access route is not restored along with the data.

How do you work with our internal IT team during an incident?

We work alongside them, following the NIST SP 800-61 lifecycle: preparation, detection and analysis, containment, eradication and recovery, then a lessons-learned review. Your team holds the system knowledge and the access; we bring the investigative process and evidence handling. We agree roles and a communication rhythm early so containment decisions are made deliberately rather than in parallel by different people.
Related services

Reduce the chance of a repeat with

Teams that come to Safe Tech AI for incident response frequently need these too.

  • Vulnerability Assessment & Penetration Testing (VAPT)

    Simulated attacks that find exploitable weaknesses before real attackers do. We combine broad automated scanning with hands-on manual testing, then hand you a prioritised, reproducible report your engineers can act on.

    Learn more

  • Endpoint Security Assessment

    A review of device-level controls, hardening, and detection coverage across laptops, servers, and workstations — the endpoints where attacks most often land and where good defaults matter most.

    Learn more

  • Network Security Assessment

    A review of your internal and external network posture — exposed services, segmentation, and misconfigurations — so you know exactly what is reachable, from where, and what to close down first.

    Learn more

Every hour after a breach either preserves evidence or destroys it.

Contact us to contain the incident, preserve forensic evidence under chain of custody, and get a clear report on what happened and what to fix.

Start an incident response retainer