Under Attack Right Now? Emergency Incident Response Atlanta, GA
Call 678-374-4352, option 1, immediately. If you hold cyber insurance, notify your carrier’s claims line as well, since many policies require it before a responder starts work. Our incident line is open around the clock, and we respond whether or not you are already a client.
Before you call, do these four things:
- Disconnect affected machines from the network. Do not power them off.
- Do not pay anything or reply to any demand.
- Stop using email to discuss it. Assume it is being read.
- Write down what you noticed and when.
The First Hour Determines How Bad This Becomes
Disconnecting rather than powering off matters because volatile memory holds evidence that disappears when a machine shuts down, and that evidence often establishes what was taken. Pulling the network cable stops the spread while preserving what investigators need.
Not paying and not replying matters because any response confirms the mailbox is live and monitored, and because payment decisions carry legal and insurance consequences that should be made with counsel rather than under pressure at midnight.
Moving the conversation off email matters because business email compromise means the attacker may be reading your incident response in real time. Use phone or a channel you know is clean.
And writing down what you noticed matters because the timeline is the single most useful thing you can hand a responder. What was the first odd thing, and when.
What Happens Once You Call
Emergency incident response begins with containment, immediately. You are speaking to a certified engineer, not an answering service taking a message for the morning.
Infected machines cut off, attacker processes killed, hostile connections blocked at the firewall, and hijacked logins locked.
Scope assessed, unauthorized access removed, vulnerabilities patched, credentials reset, and your team briefed by the engineer running the response.
Carrier and counsel notification supported, forensic timeline started, and clean recovery from backups the attacker could not reach.
Full review, controls hardened, and a written account of what happened that you can give an insurer, a client or a regulator.
If You Hold Cyber Liability Insurance, Notify Your Carrier First
This matters more than most businesses realize. Many policies require you to use an approved vendor or panel responder, and engaging somebody else first can reduce or void reimbursement even when the response itself was competent.
Call your carrier, then call us. We work alongside panel responders regularly and will align our remediation to whatever your policy requires rather than competing with it. If you are not sure what your policy says, we will help you find out quickly.
We Help Businesses We Have Never Worked With
Most of the incident response calls we take are from businesses who are not our clients. Somebody searched at two in the morning and found this page, and that is exactly what it is for.
There is no obligation attached. Our incident response team will contain the incident, help you through the notification decisions, and give you a written account of what happened. Whether you then want to talk about how the environment is protected going forward is entirely a separate conversation, and one that can wait until the fire is out.
Questions We Get Asked
Questions people ask during an incident.
Disconnect affected machines from the network without powering them off, stop discussing it over email, and call 678-374-4352, option 1. Containment matters more in the first hour than diagnosis does.
That is a decision for you with counsel and your insurer, not one to make at midnight under pressure. We will give you the technical picture, including whether recovery from backup is realistic, so the decision is informed.
Yes, and most incident calls we take are from businesses we have never worked with. There is no obligation to become a client afterwards.
Often, but notify your carrier before engaging any responder. Many policies require an approved vendor, and engaging somebody else first can affect reimbursement.
Emergency security events carry a thirty-minute response commitment. The line is answered around the clock by an engineer rather than by a message service.
For an incident we scope it honestly once we understand what we are dealing with, and we tell you before work begins rather than after. Where you hold cyber insurance, much of it is frequently recoverable, which is another reason to notify your carrier early.
Possibly, and that depends on what was accessed rather than on what was encrypted. Establishing whether data was taken is one of the first things the forensic timeline addresses, because it determines your notification duties.
What You Should Expect From Any Responder
When the incident response is over, you should receive a written account of what happened: what the initial access route was, what the attacker reached, what was contained and when, and what has changed to prevent a repeat. That document is what your insurer, your clients and possibly a regulator will ask for, and producing it is part of the job rather than an extra.
You should also expect an honest conversation about what made the incident possible. Almost every case we attend has a root cause that was visible in advance: an account without multi-factor authentication, a backup nobody had tested, a vendor connection left permanently open. Naming that plainly is uncomfortable and it is the only part of the exercise that reduces your risk next year.
The Three We Are Called About Most Often
Business email compromise. Somebody has access to a mailbox and is watching. Usually the goal is a redirected payment, and the message that triggers it is convincing because it references a real invoice and a real conversation. The tell is often a subtly wrong domain or a reply-to that does not match. Containment means resetting credentials, revoking sessions, examining forwarding rules the attacker created, and checking whether anything was already sent.
Ransomware. Files are encrypted and a note appears. What matters immediately is scope, whether backups were reachable from the compromised account, and whether data was taken before encryption, because exfiltration converts an availability problem into a disclosure problem with notification duties attached.
Credential compromise without obvious damage. A login from an unexpected country, an alert nobody understands, a password that stopped working. These are the ones businesses most often dismiss, and they are frequently the early stage of something larger. Investigating properly at this point is far cheaper than responding to what it becomes.
Emergency Incident Response Atlanta: What To Look For
Before an incident happens, set the brochures aside and ask each emergency incident response team what it will guarantee in a signed agreement. Ask who answers the incident line at two in the morning, how quickly containment starts, and whether they will respond if you are not already a client.
Ask how their incident response works alongside your cyber insurance. Many policies require a panel responder, and a good emergency incident response team aligns its remediation to your policy rather than competing with it. Then ask what written account you will receive when it is over. Our incident reports follow NIST CSF, CISA guidance and CIS v8, each where it applies, so the timeline and containment steps read the way an insurer or regulator expects.
That is the standard we hold ourselves to for emergency incident response in Atlanta: a certified engineer on the line around the clock, containment that starts on the first call, and an incident response report you can hand to an insurer, a client or a regulator. Emergency incident response works best when the first call happens early, not after the weekend.
Do Not Wait Until The Morning
Containment in the first hour is the difference between an incident and a disclosure. Call 678-374-4352 and press 1 now.