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Digital Forensics & Incident-Response Services

AI-Enhanced Evidence Collection, Court-Ready Reporting, and 24 × 7 Breach Triage

Cyber-attacks do far more than siphon data; they paralyse production lines, trigger lawsuits and erode brand trust overnight. IBM’s 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report sets the worldwide average incident at US $4.88 million, the highest figure in nineteen years¹. Fifty-seven percent of that loss stems from business disruption. Gartner projects that downtime alone will cost global enterprises US $221 billion annually by 2026 as factories, hospitals and logistics networks expand their digital footprints². Diverge IT pegs mid-market outages at US $427 per minute³, while ITIC finds Fortune-class downtime often exceeds US $16 700 per minute⁴.

Legal exposure compounds the damage. The SEC’s July 2023 cyber-disclosure rule mandates that public companies file a Form 8-K describing material incidents within four business days, a requirement expected to increase securities litigation frequency by thirty percent according to Harvard Law analysis⁵. Ticketmaster’s May 2024 breach spawned a federal class action seeking at least five million dollars within twenty-four hours⁶. Coinbase’s February 2025 extortion breach may cost up to US $400 million; its share price fell 7.2 percent in one session⁷. Marks & Spencer dropped five percent after a payment-system outage in April 2025⁸.

The 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report attributes forty-two percent of confirmed incidents to credential theft, third-party compromise or ransomware⁹. Ponemon still places median detection + containment at 204 days, yet IBM notes organisations using security AI shortened that window by 108 days and saved US $2.22 million per breach¹. ISACA’s 2025 State of Cybersecurity survey echoes the urgency: 62 percent of responders cite incident-response speed as the top board-level KPI¹⁰.

Rapid, Court-Ready Forensic Response

24 ⁄ 7 Breach Triage Hotline

Call 919-601-1601 any time. A lead examiner can launch remote volatile-memory capture via GRR Rapid Response or dispatch on-site responders within sixty minutes. We coordinate with CISA’s Joint Cyber Defense Collaborative for critical infrastructure events, ensuring intelligence feeds flow both ways.

Evidence Preservation & Immutable Chain of Custody

Disk images follow NIST SP 800-86 and are signed with SHA-256 and BLAKE3 hashes stored in append-only object buckets. Metadata is automatically pushed to an OpenTimestamps calendar so even the hash audit trail is publicly verifiable. All acquisition logs are ingested into an Elastic Security cluster, giving clients a zero-trust evidence ledger.

Endpoint, Cloud & Mobile Forensics

Our lab relies exclusively on open-source, peer-reviewed tooling. The Sleuth Kit / Autopsy handles disk images; Velociraptor and Plaso build forensic timelines; GRR Rapid Response scales live collection to thousands of endpoints. Mobile extractions leverage libimobiledevice, Andriller and mobfs, generating AFU/FFU file-system dumps without proprietary black-box code. Cloud evidence is harvested with OpenTelemetry collectors and parsed by Python scripts vetted on GitHub, covering AWS CloudTrail, Azure Activity and Google Audit logs. Elastic Security Labs confirms that open-source tooling now detects ninety-two percent of MITRE ATT&CK techniques out-of-the-box¹¹.

Crypto-Asset Tracing

Illicit actors stole US $2.2 billion in cryptocurrency during 2024¹². Using GraphSense and open-source Chain Detective, we trace DeFi swaps, Lightning-network hops and mixer outputs. A 2025 Europol report shows that blockchain-intelligence workflows enabled asset seizure in sixty-three percent of cross-border crypto-cases¹³.

Expert-Witness Testimony

Our analysts hold GCFE, GCFA and CFCE licences and have testified in federal and state courts from North Carolina to California. We translate registry artefacts, packet captures and smart-contract events into narrative exhibits that satisfy Daubert and Rule 702 criteria.

Five-Step Open-Source Forensic Process

Immediate Containment. Segmentation, privilege revocation, Zeek PCAP capture and memory dump in the first hour.
Forensic Imaging. Bit-level acquisition via dc3dd, guymager or ewf-tools; hashes stored in OpenTimestamps.
AI-Assisted Analysis. Large-language models fine-tuned on ATT&CK data parse Velociraptor collections and Surface anomalies.
Attribution & Scope. Yara rules and Sigma signatures enrich timelines with threat-intel from MISP and Abuse-CH.
Report & Remediation. Markdown reports converted to PDF via Pandoc; each finding mapped to NIST CSF, CIS Controls or CMMC practice IDs.

Return on Investigation

Accenture’s Cost of Cybercrime 2024 notes that organisations with mature incident-response capabilities save US $3.05 million per event on average¹⁴. Regulated-industry breaches still hit US $6.08 million on IBM’s index⁹. Our open-source retainer starts at US $10 000 and includes the first twenty investigator-hours, cutting exposure by up to ninety-five percent compared with ad-hoc response costs benchmarked by Field Effect¹⁵.

Case Snapshot: Fortinet VPN Exploitation

CISA and the FBI documented multiple Defense Industrial Base compromises via unpatched Fortinet SSL-VPN appliances between 2023 and 2024; one victim faced file encryption within an hour, yet rapid response limited downtime to two days¹⁶. Fortinet edge-device flaws remain prime targets: the 2025 Verizon DBIR attributes thirty-four percent of ransomware intrusions to exploited VPNs, with FortiOS and Pulse Secure leading the tally⁹. These public cases underscore why organisations must isolate malicious processes quickly, patch gateways and preserve logs to avoid downstream CMMC notifications.

Frequently Asked Questions

How fast can your team start?

On-call examiners begin evidence preservation within sixty minutes, twenty-four hours a day.

Are your reports admissible in court?

Yes. Reports follow SWGDE and ASTM E2763; our experts meet Daubert and Rule 702 standards.

Can you trace stolen crypto assets?

Our GraphSense workflow follows assets through mixers and bridges and supports subpoenas for exchange freezes.

What does a typical engagement cost?

Most cases range from US $10 000 to $55 000 depending on device count and reporting scope. A triage call is free.

Book Your Free 30-Minute Triage Call

Suspect a breach? Call 919-601-1601 or book online now. Immediate containment limits legal, operational and reputational fallout.

Digital Forensics