CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THIS IMAGE & COLOR IT IN!IR experts: You already know that cybersecurity is a zero-sum game, which is why proactive prevention is critical to protecting your crown jewels.
However, while plans can carry teams and orgs a portion of the journey, they are often abandoned or forgotten when the dragons attack—leaving most IR teams to
learn their most valuable lessons during their worst moments, pivots, and failures.
What if we could learn from others' critical misses instead of rolling our own catastrophic failures?
What if we didn't have to suffer catastrophic losses, instead relying on the lore of previous teams to inform our own?
We don't have to wonder anymore. Our team pulled together some of the most intriguing, hair-raising stories from factions past, offering expert insight into how you can turn these crushing blows into critical successes for your organization. Read on to learn more.
The Scenario: A company fell victim to fast-spreading ransomware that quickly compromised multiple systems. In their panic, they took down everything—computers, servers, the whole digital kingdom. The initial incident response team provided exactly two instructions: "Lock down everything, and start rolling backups."
Our anonymous protection paladin suspected something was wrong with that "cut and clean" solution, though. Once he was fully brought in to assess the true situation, they discovered the root cause of the problem: an internet-exposed vulnerability followed by lateral movement using compromised credentials. After two weeks of painstaking restoration work, disaster struck again: the same ransomware, the same attack vector, two weeks of recovery work down the drain.
The devastating revelation? The vulnerability existed in the backup systems themselves. The company had a plan, but they'd only tested the "traditional, in-the-box" scenarios—never validating whether their backups were actually clean or whether their restoration process was truly secure.
Critical Miss: Having an incident response plan isn't enough if you've only tested best-case scenarios. When teams panic and go full “scorched Earth” policy without understanding the attack vector, they can recreate the same vulnerabilities in their recovery systems.
Ready to turn this into a critical success?
Everything, including an organization’s backups, must be tested routinely to avoid this. IR consultants can lean into this level of preparedness with organizations once a baseline has been established, encouraging them to go deep and lateral often to avoid any unhappy surprises (like this one).
The Scenario: A healthcare organization's IT team discovered ransomware had encrypted several file servers containing patient records, compromising the organization’s HIPAA compliance and the general security of the servers. While the technical team assessed the damage, the business continuity team began implementing backup procedures, and the legal team started drafting breach notifications—all doing so without talking to each other.
The lack of coordination soon proved to be a critical miss. The IT team's containment efforts interfered with business continuity's recovery timeline, while legal's public disclosure conflicted with law enforcement's request for operational security. What should have been a 6-hour recovery became a 3-day crisis that made national headlines.
Yikes.
Critical Miss: Siloed teams operating in parallel rather than in partnership created a communication void that amplified the incident's impact. When technical teams and business units don't establish communication bridges before a crisis hits, critical information gets lost in translation. IR consultants should encourage CISOs, CTOs, and other critical stakeholders to create and test their crisis communication protocols, as well as establish out-of-band communication methods ensuring that communication remains a top priority before, during, and after an event.
Ready to turn this into a critical success?
Communication looks different depending on what’s going on before, during, or after active containment. Many find that using the framework (outlined below) is sufficient to limit collaboration and communication issues:
Communication Workflow:
The Scenario: A company was made aware of a claim of data exfiltration via a suspicious X post from a bad actor. Facing pressure to restore operations and confirm the threat, the IT director immediately reached out to Miguel, the IR expert and main character of this adventure, to see if the threat was real or not.
Of course, Miguel was willing. All they needed? The system logs to track back and identify any malicious behavior as part of the assessment process. Unfortunately, the company couldn’t provide that, as they did not have logs enabled due to space issues. The company then happily enabled the logs for Miguel, but by then it was too late.
Despite the setback, Miguel still did his best using inherent forensic knowledge and an expert approach—but with no “witnesses” or logs to stand on, the success of this adventure was limited.
Critical Miss: Prioritizing quick fixes and not coming back to potential gaps in cybersecurity limited the success of forensic preservation efforts and destroyed the opportunity for evidence-gathering needed to understand and properly respond to the incident. Speed without strategy often leads to solutions that create bigger problems—and logs should never be disabled due to space constraints.
Ready to turn this into a critical success?
Forensic-first containment strategies preserve evidence while still allowing for business continuity. The most sophisticated incident response approaches treat every compromise as both a business disruption and a crime scene.
Avoiding failure isn’t possible. Instead, the goal should be to learn from it faster than the dragons can evolve their tactics. That’s why teams need to use tabletops to transform their post-incident analyses into regular rhythms that build proactive protection, capability, and support for their infrastructure. IR consultants aid this process by remaining accessible and available to test what they come up with on a routine basis, testing it to failure, and filling the gaps.
Gaps, though, look different in this context. They go beyond just what was “gotten wrong.” Instead, they also encompass what LED to the misses in the first place—like the pressures that may have swung decisions incorrectly, the “reasonable” thinking that put the team on the wrong track.
Making a more comprehensive “failure library” is a springboard for improvement that’s evergreen, enriching your team’s understanding not only of the risk they’re facing, but of the risk of human error, flawed logic, and assumptions that often silently surface during a TTX or containment event.
The playing field is evolving—so if your team isn’t, they’re already behind. Supporting them in identifying historical critical successes and failures is a strong step to limiting risk, and helping teams remain proactively aware and prepared.
Ready to level up your incident response game? Meet Ally!
Ally supports vCISOs, MSSPs, and incident response consultants with Asa, your Scribe for your upcoming TTX. Asa documents everything on your behalf, creating customizable TTX reports in mere minutes. No more spending hours documenting lessons learned, or trying to remember who said what during the debrief. Instead, let Asa handle the admin work so you can focus on what you do best—helping teams fight the dragons and protect the crown jewels.
Stop letting critical insights for your clients slip through the cracks. Experience the difference for yourself today.
About Ally Security
Ally is here to support facilitators, which in turn creates a virtuous cycle where exercises take less time, provide more value, are run more frequently, and can make every organization can be better prepared.
The unexpected wins. The client curveballs. The chaos you couldn’t have scripted if you tried. Dear Asa is your space to share the stories that don’t make it into the official post-incident report. Script, submit, and enjoy a chance to be featured or quoted in an upcoming post.
