It’s Friday at 7:00 p.m. on a long holiday weekend, and your company just got hit by ransomware. Key systems like SSO and email are locked, employees are offline, and the response plan that looked so solid on paper suddenly feels anachronistic. Sound familiar? If you’ve been through a major incident, you know how the first 24 hours can feel like pure chaos, or “herding cats,” as some like to say. Imagine if you could turn that frenzy into an organized, efficient process that gets your business back online faster.
In this post, we’ll take you through two tales of the same incident scenario: one is the status quo where the organization scrambles with the typical patchwork of disconnected communications, and one where the CYGNVS out-of-band platform keeps everyone on the same page.
In any major incident, the first 24 hours are critical. As Nick Essner, our incident response guru at CYGNVS, puts it, “That’s when the most mistakes occur, and those mistakes end up costing you more time, more loss, and a longer outage.” It’s one thing to have the right tech stack for detection and response; it’s another to manage the human side of incident response. And that’s the tale we’re going through today: Where the technology stack ends, and you need to bring in the business side of your organization. This is when the incident becomes a people-process problem.
Let’s see how that unfolds in two different worlds.
Scrambling to find everyone: At 7:00 p.m. on Friday, your security operations center (SOC) identifies ransomware encrypting files. The SOC lead's phone call to the on-call IT manager kicks off what feels like a digital game of telephone. The reality quickly sets in: your SSO is down, corporate email is inaccessible, and most of your team is already headed out for the holiday weekend.
Some team members might see a text message on their phones, but for others, you realize with growing dread that you don't have their personal contact information. Each time someone new joins the hastily assembled conference bridge, you waste precious minutes rehashing everything that's happened so far. The clock keeps ticking. Twelve hours later, you're still trying to get key stakeholders in the loop.
Communication black hole: With corporate email unavailable, your team fractures into islands of communication. The CIO is sending updates via WhatsApp, the PR team has created an email thread on their personal Gmail accounts, and IT is frantically posting in a Signal group. Critical information gets trapped in these silos, leading to duplicated efforts and missed updates.
"I've seen incidents where the same critical task was being worked on by three different teams because no one knew what anyone else was doing," recalls Essner. "Meanwhile, the CEO is demanding hourly updates that no one has time to compile because they're too busy putting out fires."
Third parties and privilege issues: By Sunday afternoon, outside counsel finally joins the response effort, but they're missing days of crucial context. Screenshots of suspected malware activity were shared in unencrypted texts. Forensic findings were blasted to oversized distribution lists that included non-essential personnel. The legal team winces as they realize attorney-client privilege has been compromised in multiple instances, creating potential regulatory headaches down the road.
Lost time, higher costs: The scattered approach takes its toll. "Over half the time spent on an incident is spent updating other people," Essner points out. With your team mobilization delayed, critical decisions get postponed, and recovery efforts remain uncoordinated. By Monday morning, you're still in crisis mode. The longer systems stay offline, the more your reputation suffers and financial losses mount. With the average cost of a data breach climbing to $4.88 million USD in 2024, every hour of inefficiency translates directly to the bottom line.
You can see how a confusing, stressful first day sets the tone for an extended crisis. As Essner notes, "Those mistakes made up front just compound, lead to a longer outage and more expense."
Let’s rewind the same scenario – ransomware strikes on a holiday weekend – and see how the story changes with the CYGNVS out-of-band platform in place.
Rapid mobilization: The SOC detects ransomware at 7:00 p.m. Within minutes, your IR lead opens the CYGNVS mobile app and spins up a CYGNVS incident room. With a few taps, everyone on the pre-established crisis roster receives an alert to join – regardless of whether they're at dinner, or already asleep for the night.
By 8:00 p.m., your entire response team – IT, legal, PR, and key executives – has joined a secure video conference initiated directly through the platform. "We have seen customers galvanize a hundred plus person team in under 60 minutes," Essner explains. Instead of conducting a dozen one-on-one briefings, the incident lead gives a single, unified situation report. The pre-loaded incident playbook guides the team through immediate priorities. By 9:00 p.m., everyone knows their lane, their priorities, and how to coordinate.
Centralized communication and collaboration: Because CYGNVS operates completely out-of-band, it doesn't depend on your compromised network, corporate email, SSO, or enterprise directory. The platform hosts all data in a separate environment, providing secure chat, video conferencing, document storage, and other collaboration features that remain accessible even when your primary systems are paralyzed.
The IR team uploads IOCs directly to the platform while the legal team drafts response messaging in a dedicated workspace. Meanwhile, executives monitor the overall situation from their phones while on the move. Everyone works from the same digital war room, not scattered across a dozen productivity and chat apps. "This becomes your single source of truth," says Essner. "No more chaos of random tools or personal messaging accounts sending critical data into the void. Duplication of effort is eliminated since everyone is working within the same platform." Does your CEO need hourly updates? Not an issue within the CYGNVS platform. Updates are regularly provided within the platform, and your CEO can easily access them at will through the mobile app.
Incorporating third-parties: By Saturday morning, you need to bring in external resources. Your outside counsel and specialized incident response vendors are added to the platform in seconds, with permissions precisely tailored to what they need to see. Legal-sensitive communications are isolated to dedicated channels, preserving attorney-client privilege. Every action, decision, and file upload is automatically documented with full context, creating an immaculate chain of custody that will prove invaluable later.
Minimize mistakes, maximize ROI: The difference becomes stark as the hours pass. "In an incident, the house is on fire. Your advantage is controlling the chaos in those first 24 hours," Essner emphasizes. By Monday morning, your team has already contained the threat, identified affected systems, and developed a coordinated recovery plan. The business impact is dramatically reduced compared to the scattered approach, with systems coming back online in priority order and notifications sent on a timely basis. The ROI shows itself in your meantime to recover (MTTR) – days or even weeks shorter than it would have been otherwise.
In these two versions of an incident, the difference comes down to speed, organization, and the ability to make sound decisions when the stakes are highest. With the chaos of disconnected communication tools, the first day of a breach spirals into a chaotic scramble – delayed communications, lost information, and potentially compromised legal standing. With the CYGNVS out-of-band platform, you mobilize the right people quickly, maintain a single source of truth, and execute your response with precision to get back to business faster.
Those critical first 24 hours set the trajectory for your entire incident response. By eliminating guesswork, reducing chaos, and keeping everyone aligned, you give your organization the best chance of weathering the storm with minimal damage. When the next crisis hits – and it will – do you want to be caught in the chaos, or safely commanding your response from a platform designed for exactly this moment?
Looking for how to better prepare for a significant incident? Read our Preparation and Practice brief.
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