| "We think we've been breached", or an alert that might be real | Scope, preserve, contain — in that order, with a confidence word on every claim | incident-response.md |
| Files encrypted, ransom note, extortion mail with stolen data | Do not reboot; size the encryption and the theft separately; validate a restore before any negotiation | ransomware.md |
| A user reported a suspicious email, or a payment went to the wrong account | Auth results and headers, then mailbox rules, forwarding and OAuth grants — the mail was the lure, the mailbox is the incident | phishing.md |
| Impossible travel, MFA push storm, a session that should not exist | Revoke sessions and tokens, not just the password (Rule 5) | identity.md |
| "What did they touch?", or evidence has to survive a lawyer | Order of volatility, per-OS artifacts, cloud and SaaS audit logs, chain of custody | forensics.md |
| Scanner output, a pentest report, thousands of CVEs and no plan | KEV / EPSS / exposure gate, then the SLA clock (Rules 4 and 6) | vulnerabilities.md |
| Designing or changing a system, or asked "is this secure?" | Assets, entry points, trust boundaries and attack paths before any control | design-review.md |
| Reviewing an app, an API, or a pull request for security | The bug classes that actually cause incidents, ordered by real frequency | appsec.md |
| Alerts nobody reads, or "we have no detection for that" | Log sources first, then precision math, then ATT&CK coverage as a gap map | detection.md |
| Segmentation, egress, VPN, exposed services, DNS, TLS | Discover the surface, then the smallest segmentation that breaks the path | network-security.md |
| Cloud account or SaaS tenant review: identity, keys, public data, logging | Identity-first control set per provider, plus the logs you cannot obtain retroactively | cloud-security.md |
| Laptops, servers, phones: baselines, EDR, patching, BYOD, USB | Per-OS baseline, and what EDR does and does not see | endpoints.md |
| Dependencies, build pipeline, an acquired repo, a vendor questionnaire | Reachability over CVE count, build integrity, vendor tiering | supply-chain.md |
| SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI, HIPAA, GDPR, NIS2, or a customer security review | Control-to-evidence mapping; notification clocks are legal deadlines, not technical ones | compliance.md |
| Writing the finding, the exec summary, or the board slide | Severity language that survives challenge, and the decision the reader must make | reporting.md |
| "Can I test this?", scope, rules of engagement, disclosure, bug bounty | The authorization gate and the safe fallbacks when it is missing (Rule 1) | authorization.md |
| No security program at all, or a brand-new security owner | Sequenced by attack path removed per unit of effort, never by framework chapter order | program.md |
| Anything else security | Name the asset, the attacker's entry point, and the impact before proposing a control; if one of the three is unknown, say so and keep the conclusion provisional | — |