Incident Response Services for Colorado Businesses

Incident response is the structured work of containing a security incident, finding out what happened, recovering operations and documenting the event for insurers, regulators and your own decisions. North Star provides incident response and incident-readiness planning for businesses across the Denver metro area, Colorado Springs and Fort Collins, as part of the same team that runs their IT and security.

If you are dealing with an active incident right now, call 303-552-0018. Before you do anything else: do not wipe or rebuild affected machines, do not pay or contact an attacker, and if you carry cyber insurance, notify your carrier promptly — many policies require you to use their approved response firms and to report within a set window.

What Counts as a Security Incident

Not every alert is an incident, and not every incident is a breach. The events small and midsize businesses most often face are:

• Ransomware — files or systems encrypted, often after data has already been copied out.
• Business email compromise — an attacker inside a mailbox, watching conversations and redirecting payments. See our email security page.
• Account takeover — stolen credentials or session tokens used to access cloud applications and data.
• Malware on an endpoint that may or may not have spread.
• Lost or stolen devices holding sensitive information.
• Insider misuse — a departing employee copying client data, or access that should have been removed.

How We Respond

1. Triage and contain

We establish what is affected and stop it spreading: isolating endpoints, disabling compromised accounts, revoking active sessions, blocking malicious infrastructure and preserving the systems we will need to examine. Containment comes first, but not at the cost of destroying the evidence you will need later.

2. Investigate

We determine how the attacker got in, what they accessed, how long they were present and whether data left your environment. Those answers decide whether notification obligations apply and what has to change to keep it from happening again.

3. Eradicate and recover

We remove the attacker’s access, close the entry point, restore systems from known-good backups and bring the business back in a priority order you agree with — the systems that make money first.

4. Document and coordinate

We produce a written timeline and findings that your insurer, your attorney and, where required, regulators can rely on. We work alongside your legal counsel and your carrier’s breach-response panel rather than around them. Whether and how to notify affected people is a legal decision; Colorado law and federal rules such as HIPAA set specific deadlines, and your counsel makes that call with our technical findings in hand.

5. Harden

Every incident exposes a gap. We close it and the ones like it, so the same technique does not work twice.

Incident Readiness: The Work Before Anything Happens

The businesses that recover quickly are the ones that prepared. Our readiness work includes:

• A written incident response plan naming who decides what, who calls the insurer, who talks to clients, and where the contact list lives when email is down.
• Tabletop exercises that walk your leadership through a realistic scenario before it happens for real.
• Backups that are tested and protected from the same attacker who reaches your network.
• Logging and monitoring that retain enough history to answer “what did they touch?” — through our managed detection and response.
• Alignment with your cyber insurance policy, so the plan matches what your carrier requires. See cyber insurance readiness.

For managed security clients, detection and initial containment are already part of the service; our managed security services page explains how. Regulated organizations can fold incident planning into a broader vCISO and compliance program.

Frequently Asked Questions

What should we do first if we think we have been hacked?

Disconnect affected devices from the network without powering them off or wiping them, call your IT or security provider, and notify your cyber insurance carrier if you have one. Do not contact the attacker or pay a ransom before speaking with your carrier and counsel.

Should we pay a ransom?

That decision belongs to your leadership, counsel and insurer, and it carries legal considerations of its own. Our job is to make it unnecessary by having tested backups and a recovery plan that restore operations without the attacker’s help.

Does an incident mean we have a reportable breach?

Not necessarily. Whether notification is required depends on what data was involved, whether it was accessed or acquired, and which laws apply. The investigation provides the facts; your legal counsel makes the determination.

Will our cyber insurer let us use North Star?

It depends on your policy. Many carriers assign a breach-response panel for forensics and legal work. Even then, your carrier’s responders need someone who knows your environment, and we work alongside them to contain the incident and restore operations.

Prepare Before You Need It

An hour spent on an incident plan now is worth days during a real event. Call 303-552-0018 or book a readiness consultation below.