ne Digital has completed techrug's Digital Forensics & Incident Response Certification Program and is now an approved panel-list vendor within the techrug / Lloyd's of London Coverholder cyber response model, certified through Severity 3.
Very few managed services providers hold this designation. Fewer still hold it at Severity 3. For the private equity firms and portfolio companies we serve across North America and Europe, it resolves a question most organizations discover only mid-incident: when an attack hits, is the team that knows your environment actually authorized to act?
When a cyber incident hits, the first call goes to the IT provider. Under most cyber insurance policies, that call is a problem.
Carriers require incident response to be performed by vendors on their approved panel. When a managed services provider steps in without that authorization, three outcomes follow with uncomfortable regularity: the claim is denied because the response was unauthorized; the carrier pursues subrogation against the provider; and the costs incurred before the claim was tendered fall outside coverage entirely.
So the team that knows the environment best is told to stand down. An unfamiliar third-party incident response team is engaged, often hours or days later. Systems stay compromised, evidence degrades, and the business interruption clock keeps running. The incident was survivable. The response structure made it expensive.
This certification closes that gap.
techrug is a Coverholder at Lloyd's of London, holding delegated authority to underwrite cyber coverage and manage digital forensics and incident response programs on behalf of its Lloyd's syndicate. Its DFIR Certification Program trains and assesses technology providers through tabletop exercises on identifying, classifying, documenting, escalating and coordinating cybersecurity incidents, and on supporting clients through an insurance-aligned recovery. Providers who complete the program are added to the panel list as approved vendors.
The model rests on two policies working in tandem. ne Digital carries its own cyber liability coverage through the program. When a client also holds a techrug CyberBreach™ policy, both parties are insured under the same Coverholder program. That alignment removes the conflict of interest built into the conventional arrangement, where the provider and the client are insured by different carriers with different incentives, and it is what authorizes ne Digital to begin approved remediation without waiting for anyone's permission.
The program accredits providers by incident severity, and the tiers are earned separately.
Most certified providers are accredited for Severity 4, low-risk incidents such as phishing activity, suspicious logins, compromised mobile devices, endpoint alerts or isolated malware, and Severity 5, informational events requiring review, monitoring and documentation.
ne Digital is certified through Severity 3: medium-risk incidents involving possible unauthorized access, suspicious activity across multiple systems, compromised privileged accounts, business email compromise, or malware capable of spreading. These are the incidents mid-market companies actually experience. Business email compromise and privileged-account takeover are among the most frequent events we investigate, and they are precisely the events where hours of delay translate directly into financial loss.
Severity 1 and 2 incidents, critical and high, continue to route to legal counsel and dedicated forensic firms under the policy, with ne Digital coordinating as the panel vendor already inside the environment.
The designation is rare because it demands three capabilities that almost never coexist inside a single managed services provider.
An underwriting relationship. The provider must carry its own cyber liability and errors & omissions coverage through the syndicate. That means the provider's own security controls, operating processes and claims history are subject to underwriting review before the program is even available.
Live forensic and response capability. The training, covering computer forensics, network forensics, GCFE-aligned methodologies, forensic tools, threat intelligence on cyber threats, and advanced threat hunting, is instructor-led and assessed. It covers identifying evidence of compromise, assessing active threats, containment and defensive operations against a live threat actor. It is not a webinar on incident response theory.
Insurance-grade documentation. The provider must capture and preserve facts using forensic software like EnCase with a clear chain of custody in a form claims professionals and legal counsel can rely on. Most incident response fails not at containment but at the evidence preservation stage, when the record of forensic evidence is incomplete and the claim stalls.
Reaching Severity 3 required demonstrating all three above the program baseline.
When an incident occurs in a client environment, the sequence now runs like this.
The outcome for the client is fourfold: clear responsibilities across every party, one coordinated line of contact, evidence preserved from the first hour, and a structured response rather than an improvised one.
A portfolio is not one company with one incident response plan. It is a set of companies at different maturity levels, with different insurers, different IT providers and no shared standard for what happens when something goes wrong.
For portfolio companies in North America and Europe, this certification allows ne Digital to give a sponsor three things at once:
That is a single incident response standard and a single authorized vendor spanning the majority of a typical mid-market portfolio, rather than one arrangement per country.
We are deliberate about scope, because a certification described loosely is worth less than one described precisely.
This certification does not mean a business cannot experience a cyberattack, cybercrime, data breach, ransomware event, downtime, financial loss or reputational harm. No certification, insurance policy, security control or response program eliminates cyber risk. It does not guarantee that a claim will be approved, does not replace the terms and conditions of any policy, does not authorize ne Digital to independently handle every cyber event, and does not replace legal counsel, claims professionals or dedicated forensic firms. Every incident is reviewed on its own facts, through digital forensic investigations, the affected operating systems and the applicable coverage.
What it does mean is this: when an incident occurs, the people who know your environment are authorized to act, the response is documented to a standard your insurer recognizes, and the path to recovery and coverage is clearer than it would otherwise be.
This certification is one component of ne Digital's Managed Services for Cybersecurity, which brings continuous detection and response, cloud security, Microsoft security stack management and governance-led operations to private equity portfolios across North America and Europe.
Explore Managed Services for Cybersecurity!