The first priority is stopping the bleeding. Our incident responders isolate compromised systems, block attacker command-and-control communications, disable compromised accounts, and implement network-level containment measures that prevent lateral movement while preserving your ability to continue critical business operations. For ransomware incidents targeting Raleigh businesses, we immediately assess backup integrity, isolate unaffected systems, and begin recovery planning before the attacker can target your backup infrastructure.

Eradication follows containment. We identify every persistence mechanism the attacker has established — backdoor accounts, scheduled tasks, registry modifications, webshells, and compromised credentials — and remove them systematically. Partial eradication leads to re-compromise. Our team's experience with attacker tradecraft ensures we identify persistence methods that less experienced responders miss, preventing the attacker from simply re-entering through a backdoor left behind during cleanup.

Containment without investigation is incomplete. Our forensic investigation team determines the full scope of the incident: when the attacker first gained access, how they escalated privileges, which systems they accessed, what data they viewed or exfiltrated, and whether they maintained access to systems outside the initial containment boundary. This investigation is essential for accurate breach-notification decisions under the NC Identity Theft Protection Act — you cannot notify properly if you do not know the full scope of exposure.

We preserve volatile evidence using forensic imaging, memory acquisition, and log collection procedures that maintain chain-of-custody integrity. The forensic report serves multiple audiences: the legal team assessing notification obligations, the insurance carrier evaluating the claim, the regulatory agency reviewing compliance, and the IT team implementing post-incident hardening measures to prevent recurrence.

North Carolina's breach notification law imposes specific obligations that must be met without unreasonable delay. For breaches affecting more than 1,000 NC residents, the business must notify the NC Attorney General's office and all three major credit reporting agencies in addition to affected individuals. HIPAA-covered entities face additional federal notification requirements through the HHS Office for Civil Rights. Defense contractors must report cyber incidents to the DoD's DIBNet portal within 72 hours under DFARS 252.204-7012.

Our incident response team coordinates with your legal counsel to ensure notification obligations are met accurately and on time. We prepare the forensic determination that drives the notification decision, draft notification content that satisfies statutory requirements, and coordinate notification logistics. For Raleigh organizations with cyber-insurance policies, we also manage the insurance notification process and provide the documentation that carriers require for claim processing.

Ransomware is the most common and most disruptive cyber incident facing Raleigh businesses in 2026. Our ransomware response protocol prioritizes four immediate actions: isolate affected systems to stop encryption propagation, assess backup viability to determine recovery options, identify the ransomware variant to understand attacker methodology, and begin forensic investigation to determine whether data exfiltration occurred before encryption. We advise against ransom payment in most circumstances, but we provide Raleigh organizations with a complete risk analysis so leadership can make an informed decision based on recovery options, data criticality, and business-continuity requirements.

Recovery from ransomware involves rebuilding compromised systems from clean images, restoring data from verified backups, implementing hardening measures to prevent re-infection, and validating that the attacker has been fully eradicated before reconnecting systems to the production network. Our team manages the entire recovery process alongside your IT staff.

The best time to prepare for an incident is before one occurs. We develop comprehensive incident response plans tailored to your organization's industry, regulatory requirements, and operational reality. Plans define roles and responsibilities, communication protocols, escalation procedures, containment strategies, forensic preservation requirements, and regulatory notification workflows. For Raleigh healthcare organizations, plans incorporate HIPAA breach-response requirements. For defense contractors, plans address DFARS 252.204-7012 cyber-incident reporting obligations.

Tabletop exercises test your plan against realistic scenarios: a ransomware attack during a holiday weekend, a business email compromise that results in a fraudulent wire transfer, an insider threat involving data exfiltration by a departing employee. These exercises identify gaps in your response capability, clarify decision-making authority, and build the muscle memory that enables faster, more confident response when a real incident occurs.

The best incident is the one that never reaches crisis stage. PTG deploys AI-powered threat detection that identifies attacks in their earliest stages — before the attacker escalates privileges, moves laterally, or deploys ransomware. Machine learning models analyze network traffic patterns, endpoint behavior, authentication events, and email flows to detect anomalies that signature-based tools miss. AI-driven automated response can isolate compromised endpoints, disable compromised accounts, and block malicious communications within seconds of detection — buying critical time for human responders to assess and escalate.

For Raleigh organizations that have experienced an incident, we implement AI-enhanced monitoring as part of the post-incident hardening phase to detect any recurrence and provide the continuous threat visibility that prevents future incidents from reaching the crisis threshold. AI threat hunting continuously searches for indicators of compromise across your environment, identifying dormant attacker presence that traditional monitoring might miss.