Recovery
Return to normal after an incident
Returning to normal restores exactly the policy you had configured. If that policy is what produced the incident, restoring it is not a resolution.
- Recovery & emergency
- 4 min read
Before you leave the emergency mode
- The cause is changed. The permission that allowed it is now block or require approval, or the connection user is narrower, or both.
- Content is recovered as far as it can be, and you know what could not be.
- Credentials are rotated if there was any chance of exposure.
- Evidence is exported if anyone will review this later.
- The audit chain verifies.
Do not restore service to prove the fix works
Test the change on staging, or with the agent restricted, before returning the site to normal. Normal means every other agent resumes too.
Restoring service
- Return the site to normal first, while the agent responsible stays paused. Other integrations resume; the suspect one does not.
- Move the suspect agent to restricted rather than straight to active, if you want a period of reduced boundary.
- Watch the timeline for the first few real requests from it.
- Move it to active once you have seen it behave.
Afterwards
- Re-run readiness and runtime verification. Confirm the controls still behave as documented after everything you changed.
- Write down what changed and why. The audit trail records the change; it does not record your reasoning, and in three months that is what you will want.
- Review neighbouring permissions. If one Ability was too open, its siblings usually are too.
- Check the approval queue is real. If the incident happened because approvals were being cleared without reading, that is the thing to fix.
A note on what to conclude
Most incidents here end with a permission that was granted reasonably at the time and outlived its reason. That is a process finding, not a personal one — and it is what periodic permission review exists to catch before it becomes an incident.
Recovery & emergency
Keep the boundary while you fix the problem.
A good fix restores intended behaviour without creating a second path around WordPress or the governed request lifecycle.
