Client Profile
- Industry: Global Manufacturing
- Size: 50,000+ Employees
- Headquartered: United States
- Counsel: Chambers Ranked, AM Law 100
Client Challenge
In Q1 2022, a global manufacturing company with operations across more than 40 countries suffered a ransomware attack that compromised 21 internal servers and resulted in the claimed exfiltration of 1.3TB of sensitive data. The breach, later attributed to the Conti ransomware group, triggered an immediate incident response. But the window to act was narrow: the threat actor issued a five-day ultimatum to pay the ransom or risk public exposure of the stolen files.
Facing a very short deadline, the company’s legal team engaged ACTFORE to deploy its AI-powered data mining platform. With the exfiltration spanning multiple jurisdictions, the client needed to urgently determine what data was taken, who was affected, and what regulatory obligations would follow.
The data touched on regulatory regimes including HIPAA, GDPR, and U.S. state-level privacy laws, requiring fast and precise analysis. Failure to act quickly would trigger major fines, pubic exposure, and lasting reputational damage. But first, the immediate objective was to triage the breach — map the affected files, locate them across the server estate, and provide an early indication of the nature and sensitivity of the exposed information.
Solution
ACTFORE deployed immediately, launching three software instances within a client-controlled Azure environment to triage 1.3TB of data spread across 21 compromised servers and more than 869,000 files. To avoid any contention with their production systems, the client provisioned dedicated Azure environments isolated from core infrastructure. This allowed ACTFORE’s processing to run without throttling or limiting resources.
Within the first 24 hours, the team completed scanning and indexing, surfacing responsive patterns tied to 17 critical data elements. These included not only standard identifiers such as names, dates of birth, and national identification numbers, but also driver’s license and passport data, financial account details, login credentials, and health insurance records. Each category carried specific implications across regulatory and legal frameworks.
With a lean three-person team, ACTFORE operated continuous extraction workflows through the weekend, leveraging parallelized automation and real-time quality controls to ensure speed without compromising precision. Throughout, ACTFORE remained in direct coordination with the client and external counsel to ensure the extracted data was immediately actionable for downstream notification, legal exposure assessments, and risk mitigation.
Even with being given a 5 day extension, the engagement ran on an accelerated timeline to deliver high-level insights as quickly as possible to meet the attacker's ransom deadline.
Results
ACTFORE indexed and processed nearly 900,000 files within five business days, identifying more than 206,000 responsive files containing sensitive data on approximately 120,000 individuals. The team fully extracted 17 key elements with a 23.7% responsiveness rate.
The final report was delivered just 9 days after contract signature with the team working through the weekend to provide the client with a complete and defensible record of exposure prior to the ransom deadline. The insights enabled the client to initiate immediate notifications and offer two years of identity protection to impacted individuals.
By completing the engagement before the ransom deadline, ACTFORE helped the client confidently decline payment. The client later credited ACTFORE’s speed and precision as the reason they were able to avoid capitulating to the threat actor. The case remains a benchmark example of how automation, on-premises deployment, and real-time analytics can converge to solve urgent, cross-border data mining challenges under extreme time constraints.
About Us
Since 2022, ACTFORE has offered legal counsel, insurance carriers, and corporations advanced AI/ML-powered data mining technology solutions to swiftly detect and uncover sensitive information compromised in cyber breaches. ACTFORE’s on-premises, onshore, technology-first approach can process over 1 million files per hour, offering clients the fastest and most accurate assessment of compromised information. This enables swift identification of the extent of exfiltration to better assess risk.
Setting a new standard in data forensics and incident response, clients retain full control of their data with ACTFORE’s certified lab, or by requesting local deployment behind their own firewall. With over 1,000+ completed successful global engagements to date, ACTFORE consistently delivers accurate, comprehensive, results on time and on budget. For more information, please visit www.actfore.com.