How do I know if my business has already been breached?

This is a genuinely hard question to answer definitively without proper tooling, since sophisticated breaches are often specifically designed to avoid detection, but there are real warning signs worth actively watching for, and proactive checks that can surface a breach you'd otherwise never notice.

Warning Signs Worth Taking Seriously

• Unusual account activity, logins from unfamiliar locations or at odd hours, password reset emails you didn't request
• Unexpected system slowdowns, particularly if a device is suddenly running unfamiliar background processes
• Files that won't open, or unexpected file extensions, an early sign of ransomware encryption in progress
• Clients reporting suspicious emails "from you" that you didn't send, a strong sign of a compromised email account being used for fraud
• Unexplained changes to settings, email forwarding rules you didn't set up, new user accounts you didn't create
• Antivirus or endpoint alerts that get dismissed without proper investigation

Why Some Breaches Go Unnoticed for Months

Not every compromise is dramatic and immediately obvious. Some of the most damaging breaches involve an attacker gaining quiet, persistent access and observing for weeks or months before acting, harvesting information, waiting for the right moment to commit fraud, or preparing a larger attack. Without active monitoring, this kind of patient, low-noise intrusion can go entirely undetected until the attacker chooses to act.

Proactive Checks You Can Run

• Dark web monitoring, checking whether your business's email addresses and credentials appear in known breach data, even from breaches unrelated to your own systems directly
• Review account access logs, particularly for email and cloud admin accounts, looking for unfamiliar login locations
• Audit email forwarding and inbox rules, a common, easily missed technique attackers use to silently monitor a compromised account
• Review firewall and endpoint logs, for anyone with the tooling and expertise to interpret them, unusual outbound traffic patterns can indicate data exfiltration already underway

The Difference Active Monitoring Makes

This is precisely the gap 24/7 SOC monitoring is designed to close: rather than relying on someone noticing something feels "off" and then investigating manually, continuous monitoring is specifically looking for the technical indicators of compromise, unusual login patterns, suspicious process behaviour, anomalous network traffic, as they happen, surfacing genuine incidents that would otherwise go unnoticed until far more damage has occurred.

If You Suspect Something Right Now

Don't wait to be certain, isolate the suspected device or account (disconnect from the network, force a password reset and revoke active sessions) while you investigate further, and treat it as a genuine incident until proven otherwise. Acting on reasonable suspicion quickly costs far less than waiting for certainty while an active compromise continues.

Our Approach

Beyond ongoing 24/7 monitoring designed to catch active threats early, we can run a point-in-time compromise assessment if you have specific concerns right now, reviewing logs, account activity and dark-web exposure to give you a clear answer rather than continued uncertainty.