Case study / Government

State agency, IG-grade audit trail.

A US southeast state agency, 2,400 employees, citizen-facing services across multiple programs. Ransomware on shared file infrastructure during business hours. Inspector General required a full audit trail of the recovery decision. Customer identity withheld under confidentiality.

What happened.

At 14:32 the agency's shared file servers started returning unreadable files. Within 30 minutes, citizen-facing services across three programs were down. The agency's recovery question was not only technical. Recovery decisions in public-sector environments are audited. Inspectors general, state oversight committees, and CISA reporting requirements ask not only whether the agency recovered but why the agency trusted the recovery point.

The agency had backup infrastructure, snapshot history, and a written incident response plan. What it did not have was a way to produce defensible recovery evidence at the speed the situation required.

Evidence-based recovery with full audit trail.

01

Scanned shared file infrastructure

Cybersnap.io scanned 24 hours of snapshots across the affected file servers. 22 snapshots analyzed and ranked by confidence.

02

Identified compromise marker

The compromise window opened at SS-02:14. The closest clean snapshot before that was SS-02:30. Cybersnap.io confirmed this with sandbox validation.

03

Issued verdict

4 minutes after the recovery team requested it, Cybersnap.io produced a confidence-scored verdict: SAFE TO RESUME from SS-02:30, confidence 92%.

04

Exported audit trail

The complete verdict, the scan evidence, the sandbox validation, and the confidence math were exported in IG-acceptable format. Timestamped. Tamper-evident.

05

Services resumed

Citizen-facing services came back online from SS-02:30 within the same business day. No service-disruption news cycle.

06

IG audit passed

The Cybersnap.io audit trail was accepted by the Inspector General as the primary evidence of the recovery decision. CISA reporting met within the required window.

The numbers.

Decision time
4 minutes
From recovery team request to confidence-scored verdict.
Manual baseline
14 hours
Agency runbook estimate for IG-grade documentation without Cybersnap.io.
Service restoration
Same day
Citizen services back online before the news cycle could form.
IG audit
Passed
Cybersnap.io audit trail accepted as primary evidence of the recovery decision.
CISA reporting
On time
Reporting requirements met within the federal-required window.
Council briefing
Same week
Oversight committee briefed with full timeline and evidence.
What the CISO said

“In a public-sector environment, the recovery decision has to be defensible in two audits at once: the technical one and the political one. Cybersnap.io produced both.”

— CISO, anonymized customer. Reference call available under NDA after a Cybersnap.io briefing.

Evaluating Cybersnap.io for a public-sector environment?

Book a confidential briefing. We will walk through deployment, audit-trail export, and the reference customer process.