It's Not "If"—It's "When" and "Are You Ready?"
Think for yourself. Security vendors sell "prevention." Reality teaches "detection and response."
Nothing is true. Everything is permitted. Including attackers getting in. Plan for it.
Our Incident Response Plan is public because incident response through obscurity means the attackers know your plan better than you do.
Illumination: Perfect prevention is impossible. Adequate response is mandatory. Choose mandatory over impossible.
The Five Phases of Not Completely Fucking Up
1. Preparation (Before the Breach)
Practice. Test runbooks. Train responders. Build detection. Hope is not a strategy.
Illumination: Incident response plans you've never tested are fan fiction.
2. Detection (Shit Is Happening)
Know when you're under attack. Logs. Alerts. Anomaly detection. The average dwell time is months. Be faster.
Illumination: Breaches you don't detect are breaches attackers exploit fully.
3. Containment (Stop the Bleeding)
Isolate compromised systems. Cut network access. Limit blast radius. Fast containment beats perfect forensics.
Illumination: Forensic perfection while data exfiltrates is professional negligence.
4. Eradication (Kill the Attacker's Access)
Remove malware. Patch vulnerabilities. Rotate credentials. All of them. Assume everything is compromised.
Illumination: Killing one backdoor when three exist is security theater with extra steps.
5. Recovery (Back to Normal, But Smarter)
Restore from clean backups. Verify integrity. Monitor harder. Post-incident review. Learn. Improve. Repeat.
Illumination: Organizations that don't learn from incidents are destined to repeat them. Usually soon.
When to Panic vs When to Execute
Don't panic: Panicking wastes time. Execute the plan you practiced.
Do panic: If you have no plan. Then panic, then write a plan, then practice it.
Question authority: Including your own assumptions during incidents. Verify everything. Trust nothing. Especially "it's probably fine."
Incident Response Is Reality-Based Security
All hail Eris! Chaos comes for everyone. Preparation decides if you survive.
Read our full Incident Response Plan. Public. Tested. Reality-based.
FINAL ILLUMINATION: The best incident response is the one you practiced last month. The worst is the one you're reading during the incident.
— Hagbard Celine
"Assume breach. Plan survival. Practice both."
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