The Breach That Froze an Enterprise
It began with a silence. At 2:17 AM on a Friday, the IT team of a leading pharmaceutical manufacturing company in Hyderabad noticed something terrifying—all their production floor systems had gone dark. The core servers began returning connection errors. Active Directory authentication failed. Even endpoint logs stopped flowing to the SIEM. Within the next 15 minutes, more than 85% of their IT and OT systems were encrypted and rendered inoperable.
A sophisticated ransomware payload had been executed inside their environment. Initial indicators suggested a Double Extortion Model—not only had the attackers encrypted systems, but they also exfiltrated proprietary formulation data and compliance documents to a remote C2 (Command & Control) server hosted outside India. What made this even worse? The attack had penetrated both production and disaster recovery sites. This wasn’t just a cyber incident. It was an operational hostage crisis.
Enter AlliancePro: Activation of Emergency Response Protocol
The client had previously engaged AlliancePro for Vulnerability Assessment and GRC Advisory, but now they needed our Incident Response (IR) Strike Team—and they needed us fast. By 9:00 AM, our cyber emergency protocol was live. A cross-functional team of IR specialists, forensic analysts, network engineers, and data recovery experts was flown to the client’s DC/DR facility in Goa.
We began with containment, triage, and isolation:
- Network Segmentation: VLANs were shut down. Flat networks were isolated. All east-west lateral movement was halted.
- Endpoint Containment: Using EDR and Sysmon telemetry, infected hosts were blackholed to prevent data propagation.
- Initial Forensics: The payload identified was a modified variant of LockBit 3.0, deployed via a compromised domain controller and spread using SMB lateral movement and PSExec commands.
- Privilege Escalation Trail: Our Red Team traced the attack vector to a compromised VPN credential, reused across multiple services, lacking MFA.
The Turning Point: Data Recovery & Resilience Engineering
Despite the chaos, our team initiated a multi-phase recovery strategy:
🔄 Immutable Snapshot Restoration
Alliance Pro restored critical virtual machines using isolated, immutable backups from the air-gapped backup vault. Our team executed bare-metal recovery workflows and restored servers without reintroducing infected binaries.
🔍 Deep Forensic Audit
Using ELK stack with Filebeat log enrichment, we identified the precise kill chain:
Initial Access → Credential Dumping → Lateral Movement → Privilege Escalation → Exfiltration → Encryption.
This enabled the team to verify the last clean state and exclude contaminated datasets from restoration.
🔐 Sensitive Data Reclamation
The most business-critical breakthrough: formulation IP, FDA audit documents, and export compliance records—initially feared lost—were retrieved from shadow copies stored in isolated volumes that the ransomware missed due to NTFS permission errors.
🧰 Tooling Used
- Velociraptor for endpoint forensics
- Cyber Triage for automated investigation
- CrowdStrike Falcon for EDR mapping
- KAPE for timeline reconstruction
- Azure Sentinel (client-side) for log replay
- GPG decryption & SIEM correlation for cross-verification
48 Hours Later: Recovery, Containment, Hardening
In less than 48 hours, the business was back online—with hardened systems, segmented networks, re-issued credentials, and new Zero Trust access models deployed. AlliancePro helped the client:
The Outcome: Crisis Averted, Trust Reinforced
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What could have become a catastrophic breach resulting in compliance violations, IP loss, and millions in downtime was contained, reversed, and remediated—with no ransom paid.
The client retained full ownership of their data.
They passed their next regulatory audit with zero security non-conformities.
More importantly, they transformed their cybersecurity posture—from reactive to resilient.
🔐 Key Takeaways
- Rapid detection & IR saves more than just data—it saves business integrity.
- Immutable backups and offline recovery are the last line of defense.
- Forensics isn’t just post-mortem—it guides every recovery decision.
- Ransom was never paid—AlliancePro’s expertise eliminated the need.