Eradication, Recovery, and Lessons Learned

Eradication removes the threat from all affected systems. After containment confirms the scope, eradication ensures no persistence mechanisms remain — malware, backdoors, compromised credentials, or rogue accounts.

Thorough eradication includes:

• Remove all malware and implants identified in investigation
• Delete rogue user accounts and SSH keys added by attacker
• Remove attacker-added cron jobs, registry run keys, scheduled tasks
• Patch the vulnerability that enabled initial access
• Reset all compromised credentials
• Rebuild severely compromised systems from known-good images