Practical guides for modern security
Honest writing on SOC 2 readiness, continuous compliance, vulnerability management, incident response, and the messy realities of keeping a regulated business secure.
Blameless Security Postmortems: Turning an Incident Into the Thing That Prevents the Next One
The most expensive part of a security incident is the one most teams waste: the learning. A postmortem that hunts for a person to blame teaches everyone to hide the next problem; a blameless after-action review that hunts for the systemic conditions that let the incident happen turns a bad day into durable improvement. A practical walk through how to run one, the timeline-and-contributing-factors structure that keeps it honest, and how to make sure the findings become tracked work instead of a document nobody reads twice.
When Prevention Fails: Responding to a Ransomware Incident
Most ransomware advice is about prevention. But the hour after you discover encrypted files and a ransom note is its own discipline, and it is the worst possible time to be improvising. A calm, pre-decided response plan — who to call, what to isolate, how to recover, and the decisions to make with counsel and your insurer — is what separates a bad week from a closed business.
Breach Notification: Who You Have to Tell, and How Fast, When the Worst Happens
Containing a breach is half the job — the other half is the clock that starts the moment you confirm one. Regulators, customers, and contracts impose notification deadlines, some as short as 72 hours. How a lean team prepares to disclose accurately and on time instead of improvising under legal pressure.
Tabletop Exercises: Why the Plan You Rehearse Beats the One You Wrote
An incident response plan nobody has practiced is a document, not a capability. How a lean team runs tabletop exercises — low-cost, high-signal walkthroughs of a realistic breach — to find the gaps before an attacker does, and to prove to auditors the plan is real.
Backup and Disaster Recovery: The Plan You Hope Never to Use
A backup you have never restored is a hope, not a plan. How RPO, RTO, the 3-2-1 rule, and tested restores turn "we have backups" into a recovery you can actually count on when something goes wrong.
Writing an Incident Response Plan You Will Actually Use
Most IR plans are 40-page documents nobody reads at 2 a.m. A one-page runbook that works under pressure.