A Breach Starts a 72-Hour Clock. Don’t Find the Runbook During the Breach.

ApolloSRM turns a financial-aid data breach into a live incident with a 72-hour notification clock and a fixed runbook checklist. From the moment you record detection, the status moves from pending to at-risk inside the last 24 hours, then to overdue if you have not notified, or to met or late once you have, and it flags any response step that has run past its own target. The timestamps are the real ones you enter, never invented.

The clock is the hard part

The cyber-liability conversation for aid offices keeps circling one number: 72 hours to notify the Department after a financial-aid data breach. The technical containment is its own job, but the failure that turns a bad day into a finding is administrative. It is the notification deadline nobody was tracking while everyone was busy containing the breach. A runbook in a binder does not help if the binder is what you are hunting for at hour 40.

A runbook that actually runs

When you open the incident with the detection time, the 72-hour clock starts and the response steps lay themselves out: contain, preserve evidence, assess scope, notify the Department, notify the affected, remediate, and review, each with a target window. As you complete steps it tracks progress and flags any that have slipped, and the notification status is always one of pending, at-risk, overdue, met, or late, computed from the real detection and notification times. No guessing, and no fake notified status to turn a dashboard green.

The same honesty rule, under pressure

ApolloSRM will not invent a notification you did not make, the same way it will not fake a federal transmission or an SSN. In a breach that discipline matters more, not less, because the record of who knew what and when is the first thing an investigator reads. So the platform records the facts, runs the clock, and shows you exactly where you stand.

Brief the crew before the alarm, not during it

You cannot schedule a breach, but you can decide ahead of time that the clock and the checklist will be in front of you the moment one starts. That is the difference between a controlled response and a scramble for the runbook while the timer is already running.