What you do next decides the outcome.
Most ransomware attacks follow a familiar pattern. An attacker gets in, often with a valid account, and works quietly until the encryption starts.
From then on, the clock runs fast. In Splunk’s tests of ten ransomware families, the median LockBit sample encrypted its target files in under six minutes. A ransomware response that waits for someone to see an alert, investigate and act is measured in much longer.
When a team can’t tell how far an attack has spread, the safest-looking choice is to shut everything down. Servers go offline, production stops and the business waits.
Then comes recovery, and a harder question: is what you restore clean? Attackers know backups are the way back. In Sophos’s research, 94% of organisations hit by ransomware said the attackers tried to compromise their backups.
When the systems are back, the questions start. The board wants to know what happened. Under NIS2, organisations in scope must send an early warning within 24 hours of becoming aware of a significant incident. Insurers want evidence.
Without a record, your team has to rebuild the story from memory.
The faster an attack is contained, the less there is to recover.
Helm works at the data layer, where ransomware does its damage. It detects active encryption in under a second and responds automatically. It isolates the compromised user, revokes their access and cuts off lateral movement before any manual action is possible.
In a documented incident in March 2026, Helm reached full containment 8.9 seconds after the first malicious file event.
That is a demonstrated result, not a service level, and we would rather run the same test with you, in your own environment, than ask you to take the number on trust.
Because containment is targeted, the rest of the business keeps running instead of going dark. And the decisions run on fixed rules your team can read and audit. No AI decides what to shut down, so you always know why an action was taken.
8.9 seconds
from first malicious file event to full containment.
Ransomware recovery is often assumed rather than verified.
Many organisations move from contained to restored without checking whether their backups are clean, whether monitoring is healthy or whether the attacker is really gone.
If something is missed, the attack can start again, and the second recovery is harder than the first. At Helm, recovery is treated as something to confirm, not something to hope for.
Helm only clears recovery once backups, monitoring and endpoints have all been verified clean, so your team restores with certainty and the business can progress.
That is also what brings the time to recover down. A faster backup only helps if what it restores can be trusted. Sophos found that organisations whose backups were compromised were far less likely to recover within a week (26% against 46%), and their median recovery cost was eight times higher.
Put simply, your backup decides that you can recover. Helm decides how much you have to recover.
Once the attack is contained and the business is running again, accountability takes over. The board, regulators, auditors and insurers all want the same thing, a clear and accurate account of what happened and how it was handled.
Helm logs every containment event automatically, with a full forensic timeline from the first sign of encryption to verified recovery.
The evidence is mapped to frameworks such as GDPR, NIS2 and DORA, and to what insurers ask for, so your team can answer with facts the minute the board asks, instead of reconstructing events after the fact.
That record does more than meet a requirement. It turns an incident into a proof of control.
9 frameworks
covered in the Compliance Center, from GDPR, NIS2 and DORA to HIPAA, SOX and NIST.
Helm adds the containment layer your security stack is missing, without replacing the tools you already have. See how the platform works, or talk to us to understand what recovery would look like for your organisation.
