Incident Response Services for Mid-Market Companies

Name: HIFENCE
Address: 1216 Broadway, Floor 2, New York, NY, 10001, US
Telephone: +1 (332) 241-6493

An incident is decided twice: once by the plan you built before it, and once by the decisions made in the first hours. We handle both - the plan and the rehearsal before, senior coordination during, and the investigation after that makes sure it does not happen twice.

Schedule a 30-minute call

Or call us directly: +1 (332) 241-6493

Prefer to write instead? Form below ↓

Why HIFENCE?

breaches across active HIFENCE clients

2,000+

vulnerabilities identified and fixed

50+

professional certifications on the team

years of industry experience

Response coordination and post-incident investigation are led by specialists who are also certified in offensive security - people who know how attackers actually move through a network, not just what a checklist looks like.

Who these incident response services are for

Usually, incident response moves up the priority list for a concrete reason: your cyber insurer's questionnaire asks whether you have a documented and tested plan, a compliance framework requires one, a company you know just went through a ransomware week, or a near-miss in your own inbox ended well mostly by luck.

If that sounds familiar, these are the questions an incident response plan exists to answer before they are asked in anger:

If ransomware locked your file servers tonight, who decides whether to restore, negotiate, or pay - and is that person reachable?
Who has the authority to take a production system offline in the middle of a business day?
Which customers, regulators, and partners would you have to notify - and on what clock?
Has your backup ever been through a full restore under time pressure?

If a framework or insurer is what brought you here, the plan is one control among several - our compliance advisory covers the whole picture.

From incident response plan to post-incident investigation

1. Before: plan and tabletop exercises

We build the incident response plan around your actual company: roles, decision authority, escalation paths, notification obligations, and playbooks for the scenarios most likely to reach you. Then we rehearse it in a tabletop exercise with management and IT together - a plan nobody has practiced is a document, not a capability.

2. During: response coordination

When an incident happens, a senior consultant works alongside your IT team and providers: scoping what happened, setting containment priorities, preserving evidence, and keeping communication with management, counsel, and your insurer structured instead of frantic. You stay in command - we make sure decisions get made in the right order.

3. After: post-incident investigation

Once operations are stable, we establish how the attacker got in, what they touched, and what allowed it - then turn the findings into a prioritized hardening plan so the same door never opens twice. One part in business language, a technical annex for IT.

Plan development and a first tabletop exercise typically take 2–4 weeks, depending on the size of your environment.

The first step is a 30-minute call - you receive a fixed quote within 24h, scoped to your environment. Not sure what you would be protecting in the first place? Start with a cybersecurity audit.

Schedule a call

What you actually get

Written incident response plan - roles, decision authority, contact tree, notification obligations, and step-by-step playbooks for the scenarios that actually matter: ransomware, business email compromise, data exposure. Short enough to follow at 2 a.m.
Tabletop exercise with findings - we run a realistic scenario with management and IT, then document what worked, what stalled, and what to fix. The plan gets corrected before reality grades it.
Response coordination when it counts - you are not improvising alone: scoping, containment priorities, evidence preservation, and structured communication with counsel and your insurer, alongside your own team.
Post-incident investigation report - how they got in, what they touched, and a prioritized hardening plan. One part for management, a technical annex for IT.
Some of the hardening measures can be implemented by your own IT team. We tell you exactly which ones - the report does not tie you to future services.

A plan ages as fast as your company changes. If you want it owned, exercised, and kept current year round, that is part of our vCISO services. And if you want to see how we work with companies like yours first, read our case studies.

Ransomware response for New York companies

Ransomware is the scenario most plans are built around, because it turns an IT problem into a company-wide crisis in hours: operations stop, data may already have been taken, and every decision runs against a timer set by someone else.

With a rehearsed plan, the first hours have a shape: isolate what must be isolated, preserve evidence before it is overwritten, establish what data is affected and whether backups are viable, and start the notifications the law and your contracts require. Without one, those same hours are spent looking for phone numbers.

Whether to pay is a business and legal decision - yours, made with counsel. Our job is to make it an informed one, fast: what was actually taken, whether restoration is realistic, and what a payment could mean under US sanctions rules.

New York adds its own clocks: the SHIELD Act's breach notification duties when private information is exposed and, for financial services firms, the 72-hour reporting requirement under NYDFS Part 500. The plan maps these obligations before you need them; in a live incident, your counsel makes the legal calls while we keep the technical facts straight.

And because most ransomware still arrives through email, prevention is its own workstream: phishing protection closes the most common entry point, and the segmentation and tested backups that decide how bad an incident gets are the domain of our network & cloud consulting.

How this differs from other incident response companies

Search for incident response companies and the results run from global forensics firms with six-figure retainers to monitoring vendors rebranding alert triage as response.

So you know exactly what you are buying, we are just as clear about what you do not get:

It is not a 24/7 SOC or hotline.

We are a senior consultancy. Nobody here watches your screens around the clock, and we do not promise response-time guarantees we cannot keep. If continuous monitoring is what your situation calls for, we help you scope and select it - without vendor commissions.

It is not a binder on a shelf.

The deliverable is a capability, not a document: a plan your own team has rehearsed, corrected after the tabletop, and can execute under pressure without us in the room.

It is not a sales pretext.

We do not sell licenses, hardware, or forensics hours you do not need. When a situation calls for a specialist we are not - a forensics lab, a breach coach - we say so and help you engage them.

What we are: the senior partner that builds the plan with you, stands next to your team when something happens, and investigates properly afterward. When incident response turns out to be one piece of a larger security question, our cybersecurity consulting is the wider frame.

Frequently asked questions

What do incident response services include?

Four things, in our case: developing the incident response plan, testing it through tabletop exercises, coordinating the response when an incident actually happens, and investigating afterward so the same weakness is closed for good. We are a senior advisory team - we work alongside your IT staff, counsel, and insurer rather than replacing them.

We already have cyber insurance. Do we still need an incident response plan?

Yes - and increasingly your insurer agrees: questionnaires now ask whether you have a documented and tested plan, and better answers translate into better terms. The plan also makes the policy usable when it counts: it records how to engage the carrier, which approved vendors the policy requires, and who calls whom in the first hour. Discovering those clauses in the middle of an incident is the expensive way to read your policy.

What is a tabletop exercise and who should attend?

A structured walkthrough of a realistic incident scenario - typically half a day, with no systems touched. Management and IT attend together, because incidents fail at the seam between them: IT knows how to restore, management knows what the business can tolerate, and the exercise shows whether the two meet. Think of it as the decision-making counterpart of a penetration test: the pentest tests your systems, the tabletop tests your people.

Can you help if we are dealing with an incident right now?

Contact us and we will tell you honestly whether we can help within your timeframe. We are a consultancy, not a 24/7 emergency hotline, and we do not pretend to be one. What we bring is senior coordination: scoping, containment priorities, evidence preservation, and structured communication with counsel and your insurer. Call us at +1 (332) 241-6493 or use the contact page - either way, you get a direct answer.

Do SOC 2, HIPAA, or PCI DSS require an incident response plan?

Yes - all three expect documented, tested incident response procedures. HIPAA requires security incident procedures, PCI DSS requires an incident response plan that is reviewed and tested at least annually, and the licensed CPA firms that perform SOC 2 audits look for incident management controls operating in practice, not just on paper. If a framework deadline is what brought you here, start with our compliance advisory - it covers SOC 2, HIPAA, and PCI DSS end to end.

How much do incident response services cost?

It depends on the size of your environment and what already exists - which is why the 30-minute call comes first: at the end of it you receive a proposal with a fixed quote within 24h, scoped to your environment. No retainers you did not ask for, no surprise hourly meters.

Prefer to send a written question?

Send a few details and we reply within 24h.

Build the plan before you need it

30 minutes on your situation: what exists today, what is missing, and what a realistic incident response plan looks like for a company your size. If what you already have is enough, we tell you straight.

Schedule a 30-minute call