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18:30 Friday – Initial Alert
You’ve just put the kettle on after a long week and are looking forward to a cosy weekend away with your family when suddenly your phone rings. It’s your business partner.
“Sorry to call you of a Friday evening - there have been multiple security alerts, we’re quite concerned, and you’ll need to have a look.”
You head back upstairs to your home office, open your laptop, and immediately see your monitoring dashboard flooded with high-severity alerts. The EDR shows sustained outbound HTTPS traffic from a production host to an unrecognised external IP range.
18:40 – Triage Begins
You notify your on-call engineer and join the incident response bridge. Detections show that a service account has initiated multiple authenticated sessions outside normal parameters (out of hours, unusual source IPs and unusual access patterns).
19:00 – Log Correlation
From cloud audit, object-store, and SIEM logs you can see that an unrecognised process listed and downloaded large volumes of objects from several storage containers and file shares including customer documents, email attachments, identity records, and contact lists, employee HR files, and archived backups. Telemetry indicates about 50.6 GB of compressed outbound transfers to an unrecognised IP block.
19:15 – Initiate Containment
Following the incident response plan, the team moves quickly to contain the breach, isolating affected systems and tightening access controls. Some measures temporarily reduce performance and disrupt certain connected services. The response plan is executed effectively, preventing further data loss.
20:00 – Preliminary Assessment
Access logs show that the attacker retrieved personal data of thousands of customers. Whilst the server-side encryption for stored objects remained active, the attacker accessed and downloaded these files through legitimate API calls, meaning they now possess the plaintext contents.
20:30 – Regulatory Clock Starts
As CISO, you determine that this constitutes a personal data breach. Under GDPR Article 33(1), you must notify the competent supervisory authority “without undue delay and, where feasible, not later than 72 hours after having become aware of it, unless the personal data breach is unlikely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of natural persons.”
You open the Article 33 breach-notification template and, coordinating with the incident-response team, begin allocating tasks and scheduling work between now and Monday to meet the 72-hour deadline.
21:30 – Final Response Actions
With containment achieved and the scope of exfiltration provisionally confirmed, the team preserves forensic evidence, engages external breach counsel and communications advisors, and begins preparing regulatory and customer notifications.
The trip with the family is officially cancelled as you face into the long weekend ahead.
The Reality of a Breach
For you, this is only the beginning of a long seventy-two hours of investigation, reporting, and recovery, a story that plays out for hundreds of CISOs and CPOs every year. More than 80% of cyber-attacks occur on weekends or holidays, when key members of your security and leadership teams are most likely to be away or unavailable.
Despite having a robust incident-response plan, an on-call security team, and enterprise-grade monitoring, your company is still required to notify the Data Protection Authority, affected customers and employees, and issue a public statement to manage reputational impact.
The key point here is that because personal data was exfiltrated, a full regulatory disclosure has been triggered, leading to financial penalties, reputational damage, and a lasting erosion of customer trust. Beyond the immediate costs, the business will face scrutiny from regulators, investors and clients, damage than can persist long after the incident has been resolved.
A Different Outcome
Imagine the same scenario with a different outcome. If Binarii Labs’ software had been deployed, what followed would have been entirely different.
Rather than complete files residing in a single storage location, only encrypted fragments of data would exist, dispersed across multiple, isolated cloud environments. If an attacker gained access as they did in this scenario, they would have obtained cryptographically random fragments with no decipherable meaning, rendering the exfiltration attempt effectively useless.
Confirmation that no personal data had been exposed would reclassify this event from a full-scale regulatory breach into a contained security incident. Data secured using Binarii Labs’ technology is meaningless in isolation, ensuring that no personal data would be considered to have been compromised. Consequently, no breach notification would be required under GDPR.
Depending on the organisation’s sector, and the specific nature of the event, a limited technical report may still be required under NIS2. This would remain a private, technical compliance step, with the scope of any reporting significantly reduced.
Rather than a weekend lost to crisis management, compliance deadlines and breach-response crunch, you confirm containment by 20:30. The on-call team transitions from crisis posture to post-incident review, leveraging Binarii Labs’ integrated audit trail to support reporting, verify data integrity, and confirm that no stakeholder data has been compromised.
The business continues uninterrupted, reputational and regulatory risk are neutralised, and the incident is closed with minimal impact.