When a Breach Hits, Every
Minute Costs You $16,000.
The average data breach takes 277 days to identify and costs $4.45M. Organizations with an IR retainer contain breaches 54% faster and save an average of $2.66M per incident. Our GIAC-certified digital forensics team deploys in under 1 hour -- because when the alarm sounds at 2 AM, you need operators, not voicemail.
Time (SLA)
Containment Rate
Across APAC
Per Incident
What Happens When You Do Not Have an IR Retainer
Breaches do not happen during business hours. They happen at 2 AM on a Saturday. Without a pre-negotiated retainer, this is what your organization faces.
72+ Hours to Find an IR Firm
Without a retainer, you are calling firms cold during the worst day of your career. Most reputable IR firms are already engaged. The ones available demand 3-5x premium rates and require legal review of engagement terms before they start. Every hour of delay extends the breach and multiplies the damage exponentially.
Evidence Destroyed by Panic
Your IT team reboots compromised servers, reimages workstations, and rotates credentials without preserving forensic evidence. When the IR firm finally arrives, the kill chain is gone. You cannot determine what data was exfiltrated, how the attacker got in, or whether they still have access. Your breach notification to regulators becomes guesswork.
Ransomware Spreads Unchecked
While you are negotiating contracts with an IR firm, the ransomware is encrypting production databases, backup systems, and file shares. Groups like LockBit and BlackCat deploy laterally within 45 minutes of initial access. Without a response team on speed dial, your 1-hour window becomes a 72-hour catastrophe.
Regulatory Penalties Stack Up
PDPA, GDPR, and PIPL mandate breach notification within 72 hours. Without forensic analysis to determine scope, you cannot file accurate notifications. Late or incomplete notifications trigger maximum penalties. Singapore's PDPA alone allows fines up to SGD 1M or 10% of annual turnover. You cannot comply if you do not know what happened.
Insurance Claims Denied
Cyber insurance policies increasingly require incident response retainers and documented forensic evidence for claims. Ad-hoc response without chain-of-custody evidence preservation leads to claim denials. The $2M policy you have been paying premiums on becomes worthless when the insurer rejects your poorly documented claim.
Attacker Persistence Undetected
Without thorough forensic investigation, 38% of breached organizations experience a second incident within 12 months from the same threat actor. Incomplete remediation leaves backdoors, persistence mechanisms, and compromised credentials in place. You think the breach is over -- the attacker knows it is not.
Stand Alone Complex: Do Not Face a Breach Alone
Get a free 30-minute IR readiness consultation. We will evaluate your current incident response capabilities, identify critical gaps, and show you exactly what happens in the first 60 minutes of a breach -- with and without a retainer.
Why Pre-Negotiated IR Retainers Save Businesses
1-Hour Guaranteed Response SLA
When your SOC escalates an incident, our on-call DFIR team picks up within 15 minutes. A senior incident commander is assigned within 30 minutes. Remote forensic collection begins within 1 hour. On-site deployment within 4-8 hours for critical incidents in APAC. No contract negotiations, no procurement delays, no waiting.
GIAC-Certified Forensic Analysts
Our DFIR team holds GCFE, GCFA, GNFA, GREM, and EnCE certifications. Experienced in ransomware negotiations, nation-state intrusions, insider threats, and BEC fraud investigations. Court-admissible forensic evidence collection following NIST 800-86 and ISO 27037 standards.
Pre-Negotiated Rates Save 40%
Ad-hoc IR engagements command premium rates: $450-$650/hour during a crisis. Retainer clients lock in rates of $275-$350/hour -- a 40% savings when you need it most. Plus, unused retainer hours can be applied to proactive services like threat hunting, tabletop exercises, and IR playbook development.
Pre-Staged Environment Knowledge
During retainer onboarding, we document your network architecture, critical assets, key personnel, and escalation procedures. When an incident occurs, we already know your environment. No 4-hour onboarding call during a crisis. Our team starts containing from minute one because they know where to look.
Legal & Regulatory Support
Our forensic reports are structured for regulatory notification (PDPA, GDPR, PIPL, HIPAA), insurance claims, and legal proceedings. We work under attorney-client privilege when directed by your legal counsel. Evidence collection follows chain-of-custody standards that hold up in court and satisfy regulatory investigators.
Proactive Readiness Services
Your retainer is not just insurance -- it is an active defense program. Quarterly tabletop exercises, annual IR playbook reviews, threat intelligence briefings, compromise assessments, and purple team exercises are included. When the real incident comes, your team has rehearsed the response dozens of times.
Incident Response Execution Framework
Our IR methodology follows NIST SP 800-61, SANS PICERL, and is informed by 180+ real-world incident engagements across APAC.
Triage & Initial Assessment (0-1 Hours)
Incident commander assigned. Initial scope assessment through interviews, log review, and alert correlation. Severity classification (P1-P4) and resource mobilization. Communication channels established with your CISO, legal, and PR teams. Forensic hold notices issued to preserve evidence. Remote forensic tools deployed to affected endpoints for immediate telemetry collection.
Containment & Evidence Preservation (1-4 Hours)
Short-term containment: isolate affected systems, block malicious IPs and domains, disable compromised accounts, and segment network zones. Forensic imaging of critical systems using write-blockers and validated tools. Memory capture for volatile evidence. Network traffic recording for lateral movement analysis. All actions logged with timestamps for legal admissibility.
Investigation & Root Cause Analysis (4-48 Hours)
Deep forensic analysis: timeline reconstruction, malware reverse engineering, network traffic analysis, log correlation across SIEM/EDR/cloud platforms. Identify initial access vector, lateral movement path, data accessed or exfiltrated, persistence mechanisms, and threat actor attribution. Determine the complete scope of compromise -- what data, what systems, what accounts.
Eradication & Hardening (24-72 Hours)
Remove all attacker presence: backdoors, web shells, scheduled tasks, registry modifications, and compromised credentials. Patch exploited vulnerabilities. Implement emergency hardening measures: MFA enforcement, privileged access restrictions, network segmentation improvements. Verify eradication through threat hunting across the entire environment.
Recovery & Monitored Restoration (48-96 Hours)
Phased system restoration from verified clean backups. Enhanced monitoring during recovery period to detect any attacker re-entry. Business operation restoration prioritized by criticality. Continuous validation that restored systems are clean and hardened. Temporary elevated monitoring rules to catch any residual threat actor activity.
Reporting, Lessons Learned & Improvement (5-10 Days)
Comprehensive forensic report suitable for regulators, insurers, and legal counsel. Executive summary for board presentation. Detailed technical report with IOCs, timeline, and evidence chain. Lessons learned workshop with your security and IT teams. Updated IR playbooks based on real-world findings. 90-day monitoring period to verify complete eradication.
Psycho-Pass: Your Threat Level Is Higher Than You Think
Organizations with IR retainers contain breaches in an average of 128 days. Organizations without retainers take 277 days. That is 149 extra days of an attacker in your network, accessing your data, and expanding their foothold. The retainer pays for itself with the first incident.
Secure Your Retainer Now →Incident Response Retainer Packages
All retainers include 24/7 hotline access, GIAC-certified responders, pre-staged environment documentation, and proactive readiness services. Unused hours roll into proactive security activities.
Essential Retainer
Core IR coverage for growing organizations
- ✓ 24/7 IR hotline access
- ✓ 4-hour response SLA
- ✓ 40 pre-paid IR hours
- ✓ Environment documentation
- ✓ Annual tabletop exercise
- ✓ Forensic report for 1 incident
Professional Retainer
Comprehensive IR + forensics for mid-market enterprises
- ✓ 24/7 IR hotline + dedicated Slack
- ✓ 1-hour response SLA
- ✓ 100 pre-paid IR hours
- ✓ Quarterly tabletop exercises
- ✓ Annual compromise assessment
- ✓ IR playbook development
- ✓ Threat intelligence briefings
- ✓ Regulatory notification support
Enterprise DFIR Retainer
Full-spectrum IR, forensics, and continuous threat hunting
- ✓ Everything in Professional
- ✓ 30-minute response SLA
- ✓ 200 pre-paid IR hours
- ✓ Dedicated incident commander
- ✓ Monthly proactive threat hunting
- ✓ Ransomware negotiation support
- ✓ On-site deployment (APAC)
- ✓ Board-level crisis communication
Confidence Guarantee: Unused Hours Never Go to Waste
If you do not experience an incident during your retainer period (and we hope you do not), 100% of your pre-paid hours roll into proactive security services: threat hunting, compromise assessments, tabletop exercises, IR playbook development, and purple team engagements. Your retainer investment always delivers value -- either as insurance or as active defense improvement.
Battle-Tested Incident Responders
When It Mattered Most, We Were There
At 3 AM on a Sunday, our SOC detected ransomware spreading across our file servers. We called Seraphim's IR hotline and had a senior incident commander on a call within 12 minutes. They contained the outbreak to 8 systems out of 2,000. Without the retainer, we would have lost our entire production environment. The forensic investigation identified the initial access point and we patched it before markets opened Monday morning.
Michael Wong
CISO, Hong Kong Financial Services Firm
We discovered an insider was exfiltrating customer data through a personal cloud storage account. Seraphim's forensic team preserved evidence with proper chain of custody, reconstructed 6 months of activity, and provided a report that our legal team used in criminal proceedings. The evidence held up in court. Their professionalism under pressure was extraordinary -- they treated it like a military operation.
Aisha Lim
General Counsel, Malaysian Healthcare Group
The quarterly tabletop exercises alone justified our retainer cost. When we actually experienced a BEC attack targeting our CFO, the finance team recognized the tactics immediately from the simulations. They escalated within minutes instead of wiring $2.3M to a fraudulent account. Seraphim's IR team traced the attack to a compromised vendor email account and helped us notify affected parties within the PDPA timeline.
Tanaka Sato
CTO, Japanese Manufacturing Conglomerate
Frequently Asked Questions
An IR retainer is a pre-negotiated agreement that guarantees rapid access to a dedicated incident response and digital forensics team when a security incident occurs. Think of it as cybersecurity insurance backed by actual operators. You pay an annual fee that covers: guaranteed response SLAs, pre-staged environment documentation, pre-paid investigation hours at discounted rates, and proactive readiness services. When an incident occurs, there is zero procurement delay -- you call, we respond.
We handle the full spectrum of cybersecurity incidents: ransomware attacks, data breaches, business email compromise (BEC), insider threats, nation-state intrusions, DDoS attacks, cryptocurrency theft, supply chain compromises, cloud account takeovers, web application attacks, and regulatory investigations. Our team has experience with every major ransomware group operating in APAC, including LockBit, BlackCat/ALPHV, Cl0p, Play, and Royal. We also support post-breach regulatory notifications across all APAC jurisdictions.
You call our 24/7 IR hotline. An on-call analyst answers within 15 minutes (not a call center -- an actual DFIR professional). They perform initial triage, determine severity, and escalate to a senior incident commander. Within 30-60 minutes depending on your SLA tier, you have a dedicated response team on a war room call. Remote forensic collection tools are deployed immediately. For P1 incidents requiring physical presence, our APAC-based team deploys on-site within 4-8 hours. The entire process is rehearsed and documented in your retainer onboarding playbook.
Unused incident response hours are not wasted. They convert to proactive security services at a 1:1 ratio. Options include: tabletop exercises, IR playbook development, compromise assessments (proactive threat hunting in your environment), purple team exercises, security awareness training for executives, dark web monitoring for leaked credentials, and threat intelligence briefings. Most retainer clients use 30-40% of their hours on proactive services, which significantly improves their security posture and incident readiness.
Yes. Our forensic evidence collection follows NIST 800-86, ISO 27037, and ACPO Guidelines. We maintain rigorous chain-of-custody documentation, use write-blocked forensic imaging, validate evidence integrity with cryptographic hashes, and our analysts are experienced expert witnesses. Our reports have been accepted in criminal proceedings, civil litigation, regulatory investigations, and insurance claims across Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Japan, Hong Kong, and South Korea. When engaged under attorney-client privilege, our work product receives additional legal protections.
Our Enterprise tier includes ransomware negotiation support. We have experienced negotiators who understand the tactics, pricing strategies, and decryption reliability of major ransomware groups. We always recommend against payment and work to restore operations from backups first. However, when payment is the only option (determined jointly with your legal counsel and insurer), we manage the negotiation to minimize payment, verify decryption tool functionality, and ensure the threat actor deletes exfiltrated data. We also coordinate with law enforcement as appropriate.
Multi-jurisdiction incidents are our specialty in APAC. We maintain regulatory notification expertise across Singapore PDPA, Malaysia PDPA, Thailand PDPA, Japan APPI, South Korea PIPA, Hong Kong PDPO, Indonesia PDP, Philippines DPA, and GDPR for organizations with EU data subjects. Our legal coordination team ensures timely notification to all relevant authorities, manages cross-border evidence sharing requirements, and coordinates with local law enforcement agencies. We have handled incidents spanning 5+ APAC countries simultaneously.
Bebop Protocol: Be Ready Before the Alarm Sounds
A breach is not a question of if, but when. The difference between a contained incident and a company-ending catastrophe is preparation. Secure your retainer now -- because at 2 AM on a Saturday, you want operators on the line, not a procurement process.
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