Operational resilience a regulator — and a real attacker — would accept.
Readiness for the Digital Operational Resilience Act across its five pillars, evidenced by the same senior team that runs the testing it asks for.
- Senior-led delivery.
- Vendor-independent.
- Evidence-driven reporting.
DORA (Regulation (EU) 2022/2554) has applied since 17 January 2025. It pulls ICT risk for financial entities — and the providers they depend on — out of guidance and into binding obligation: governance, incident reporting, resilience testing, and third-party oversight, supervised and evidenced.
We get you ready and keep the evidence current — without standing in for your lawyer. We map each obligation to a control your team can operate, and because we also run threat-led testing, the resilience-testing pillar is delivered by people who do the work, not just describe it. Interpretation of the law stays with your counsel.
What DORA asks for
ICT risk-management framework
- A documented, board-owned framework — identification, protection, detection, response, and recovery — proportionate to your size and risk, with the policies, roles, and evidence a supervisor expects to see operating.
ICT-related incident reporting
- Classification, thresholds, and the major-incident reporting workflow to your competent authority on DORA’s timelines — built so the process holds under pressure, not just on paper.
Digital operational resilience testing
- A risk-based testing programme — and, for the entities in scope, threat-led penetration testing (TLPT) aligned to the TIBER-EU framework. We run the testing and produce the evidence in the form your supervisor expects.
ICT third-party risk management
- The register of information, contractual requirements, concentration-risk view, and exit strategies for critical ICT providers — the pillar most programmes underestimate.
Scope. We provide compliance evidence and readiness, not legal advice — whether and how DORA applies to your entity is your counsel’s call. We hold no supervisory or certification authority and claim none.
When teams call us
The most common moments organisations bring us in for DORA:
- A financial-sector client’s procurement or due-diligence team is asking for DORA evidence before they sign or renew.
- You are an ICT provider to EU financial entities and DORA obligations are landing in your contracts.
- A supervisor or internal audit has flagged the ICT risk framework or the third-party register as thin.
- Threat-led testing (TLPT) is in scope and you want the testing and the evidence from one senior team.
What you receive
The HackingByte Engagement Brief
Every service ends in the same three connected artifacts — so exploit, control gap, and business impact tell one story.
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Technical Report
Reproducible findings with evidence and per-finding remediation, written for your engineers.
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Executive Risk Brief
The same findings as business risk for leadership and the board — no jargon, no CVSS tables.
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Action Plan
Prioritised, owner-assigned, and scoped to what your team can actually deliver.
Timeline
What a typical readiness engagement looks like.
DORA readiness runs to a defined gate. A representative engagement opens with a scoping and gap diagnostic against the five pillars — usually a couple of weeks — then a mapped framework, evidence model, and prioritised remediation plan over the following weeks to a few months, sized by how many pillars need work and whether TLPT is in scope. An ongoing programme then maintains the register of information, the testing cadence, and the incident-reporting readiness as a continuing arrangement.
We set the schedule around your real pressure — a supervisor’s expectation, a financial-sector client’s due-diligence questionnaire, or a contract renewal — and confirm it during scoping before you commit.
How it’s different
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Testing-informed — the same senior team that runs threat-led and red-team engagements advises on the resilience-testing pillar, so the programme reflects how attacks actually unfold, not just how the regulation reads.
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Evidence that doubles as the answer — the artefacts we build are what you hand a supervisor, an auditor, or a financial-sector client when they ask how ICT risk is managed.
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Scoped to proportionality — DORA is risk-based; we right-size the framework to your entity rather than bolting on controls a smaller firm will never operate.
Who DORA applies to
Financial entities — and the ICT providers behind them.
DORA covers a broad set of EU financial entities — banks, payment and e-money institutions, investment firms, insurers and intermediaries, crypto-asset service providers, trading venues, and more — and reaches their critical ICT third-party providers, including those designated as critical and supervised directly. If you sell technology into EU financial services, DORA reaches your contracts even when you are not a financial entity yourself.
That dual reach is why we scope first: a payment institution, an insurer, and a SaaS vendor serving EU banks each carry different obligations. We confirm where you sit — in-scope entity, ICT provider, or both — before designing anything.
Resilience testing & TLPT
The pillar where testing and compliance meet.
DORA requires a risk-based digital operational resilience testing programme, and — for the entities the regulation identifies — advanced threat-led penetration testing (TLPT) aligned to TIBER-EU: intelligence-led scenarios, controlled execution against production, and evidence built for supervisory submission. This is where our offensive work and our GRC work run as one programme rather than two vendors.
Where TLPT is in scope, our red-team and threat-led testing delivers it directly; where it is not, we scope the proportionate testing DORA still expects and document why. Either way the resilience-testing evidence is produced by the team that ran the test.
Frequently asked questions
Does DORA apply to us if we’re not a bank?
- Quite possibly. DORA covers a wide range of EU financial entities and reaches critical ICT third-party providers serving them. Whether and how it applies is a legal determination for your counsel — we help you scope the obligations and build the evidence once that’s settled.
Is this legal advice?
- No. We provide compliance evidence and readiness; interpretation of DORA and how it applies to your entity is left to your counsel. We support that work rather than replace it.
Can you run the threat-led penetration testing (TLPT)?
- Yes — where TLPT is in scope we deliver it directly, aligned to TIBER-EU, with the evidence trail built for supervisory submission. Our DORA advisory and the testing run as one programme.
How does DORA relate to NIS 2 and our ISO 27001 work?
- They overlap heavily on controls and evidence. We map one control set across DORA, NIS 2, and ISO 27001 so each obligation becomes an evidence exercise rather than a separate programme.
Tell us where you sit — financial entity, ICT provider, or both — and the deadline you’re working to. We’ll scope DORA readiness around both.
Every engagement ends in the same three connected artifacts, and the continuous platforms keep watch between engagements. Continuous monitoring platforms.