Question: What is the first indicator that a system has been compromised?

Aurelia Brzezowska answered on 20 Mar 2026:

Brilliant question, often it is a system or user trying to perform tasks outside of their usual scope such as accessing services at unusual times, downloading large amounts of data, sharing things externally and starting processes they shouldn’t. This all logged, correlated (patterns made/found) and sent to Security Analysts to check if any malicious activity has been found and if so, isolate it! Often the first step is to minimise damage, ensure privileges such as access is revoked and follow the appropriate forensics process to figure out what went wrong.