Incident Response Policy

1. Purpose & Scope

The purpose of this policy is to provide a structured, repeatable, and accountable framework for managing security incidents across Vexor’s infrastructure, applications, datasets, and operational environments. The policy applies to:

• All production and pre-production systems
• All employees, contractors, vendors, and partners handling Vexor data
• All user-facing components, backend systems, APIs, and cloud assets
• Any data processing system governed by privacy regulations (GDPR, CCPA, COPPA, etc.)

2. Incident Categories

Incidents covered by this policy include, but are not limited to:

• Unauthorized Access: Compromised accounts, privilege escalation, credential misuse.
• Data Breaches: Exposure, exfiltration, or destruction of personal or sensitive data.
• Service Outages: Downtime, degraded performance, or infrastructure failures.
• Malware & Intrusions: Ransomware, rootkits, botnet activity, or malicious exploitation attempts.
• API Abuse & Automation Attacks: Botnets, scraping, mass login attempts, spam attacks.
• Content Safety Incidents: CSAM, imminent threats, police-reportable content.
• Fraud & Financial Abuse: Monetization fraud, payment manipulation, identity theft.
• Insider Threats: Unauthorized internal access or misuse of privileged systems.

3. Detection & Monitoring

Vexor maintains a 24/7 monitoring and alerting ecosystem including:

• Intrusion Detection & Prevention Systems (IDS/IPS)
• SIEM (Security Information & Event Management) correlation engines
• Real-time anomaly and behavioral analytics
• Automated abuse detection for bots, scraping, and account compromise
• API monitoring for abnormal or malicious patterns
• Continuous system health dashboards and availability metrics

Alerts are triaged by the Incident Response Team (IRT) to determine severity, impact, and required escalation paths.

4. Incident Response Lifecycle

Vexor follows a structured, internationally recognized incident response lifecycle:

4.1 Identification

Validate alerts, confirm incident scope, classify severity, and assess potential impact to systems, users, or compliance obligations.

4.2 Containment

Immediate actions may include:

• Isolating affected servers or APIs
• Revoking compromised credentials or tokens
• Rate limiting, captchas, or automated blocking
• Temporarily disabling affected features

4.3 Eradication

Remove malicious artifacts, patch vulnerabilities, close exploited vectors, and conduct forensic analysis.

4.4 Recovery

Restore systems from clean backups, validate integrity and performance, re-enable features, and perform post-recovery monitoring.

4.5 Post-Incident Reporting

IRT documents root cause, timeline, response actions, affected systems, user impact, legal considerations, and mitigation recommendations.

5. Severity Levels & Escalation

Incidents are categorized into four severity tiers:

• Critical (SEV-1): Active data breach, CSAM, extortion, ransomware, platform-wide outage.
• High (SEV-2): Major service disruption, account compromise affecting many users.
• Medium (SEV-3): Limited system issues, localized abuse activity.
• Low (SEV-4): Minor bugs, non-impactful anomalies, logging irregularities.

SEV-1 and SEV-2 events trigger 24/7 on-call escalation and cross-department coordination with Legal, Safety, Engineering, and Communications.

6. User Notification Requirements

Users will be notified without undue delay if their data or account integrity is impacted. Notifications will include:

• Description of the incident
• What information was affected
• Actions Vexor has taken to protect users
• Recommended user steps (password reset, security checks, etc.)

Notifications follow jurisdictional requirements including GDPR (72-hour breach reporting), CCPA, and other regional data laws.

7. Regulatory & Law Enforcement Notification

For qualifying incidents, Vexor notifies:

• Data Protection Authorities (GDPR: within 72 hours)
• Sector-specific regulators where applicable
• Child safety agencies for CSAM-related incidents
• Law enforcement units for credible threats, exploitation, or criminal conduct

All disclosures follow the procedures outlined in the Vexor Law Enforcement Request Guide.

8. Forensics & Evidence Handling

During incident investigation, Vexor may preserve:

• System logs, audit trails, and API request data
• IP logs, device identifiers, access tokens
• Database snapshots
• Malicious payloads, compromised artifacts, and exploit indicators

Evidence is handled securely following legal, regulatory, and chain-of-custody procedures.

9. Internal & External Communication Protocols

Vexor coordinates communication across multiple teams to ensure accuracy and consistency:

• Engineering & Security: Technical details, recovery steps.
• Legal: Compliance obligations, regulator disclosures.
• Safety: Risk mitigation for affected users.
• Communications: Public statements, PR, user notifications.

Unauthorized disclosure by staff is strictly prohibited.

10. Post-Incident Reviews (PIR)

After significant incidents, the Incident Response Team conducts a formal review to:

• Assess the effectiveness of response actions
• Identify root causes and contributing factors
• Recommend security improvements
• Update detection mechanisms and incident playbooks

11. Training & Incident Simulation Drills

To maintain readiness, Vexor performs:

• Annual incident response simulations (tabletop exercises)
• Quarterly escalation drills for SEV-1 and SEV-2 incidents
• Employee cybersecurity training and phishing simulations
• Secure engineering and operational readiness workshops

12. Contact Information

For reporting incidents, suspected vulnerabilities, or operational emergencies:

Incident Response Team: irt@vexor.to
Security Team: security@vexor.to
Emergency Escalation: emergency@vexor.to
Legal & Compliance: legal@vexor.to

13. Updates to This Policy

This Incident Response Policy may be updated as our systems, regulations, and operational maturity evolve. Material updates will be published with revision dates and communicated to relevant internal and external stakeholders.