The terms that apply to this website — not to any engagement.

1. Scope

These terms govern your use of backstopcyber.com, operated by Cybermint LLC, a North Carolina limited liability company trading as Backstop Cyber ("we", "us"). By using the site you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not use the site.

They apply to the website only. Any actual work we do for you is governed entirely by a separate signed engagement agreement, statement of work and rules of engagement. Where those documents conflict with this page, those documents win.

2. Submitting the form does not create an engagement

Sending us a message through the contact form does not create a client relationship, a contract, a retainer, or any obligation on our part to perform work or to respond within any particular time. It is an enquiry, and nothing more.

An engagement begins only when both parties have signed a written agreement setting out scope, deliverables, dates, fees and rules of engagement. Until that is signed:

• Nothing on this site is an offer capable of acceptance, and no price, timescale or deliverable described here is contractually binding.
• We owe you no duty of care in respect of your systems, and we are not monitoring, defending, testing or advising on anything of yours.
• You should not rely on anything said in a scoping conversation as a professional opinion you can act on.

Please do not send us confidential information, credentials, live findings, customer data, or anything covered by an existing NDA through this form. If you need to share sensitive material, tell us in the message and we will agree a suitable channel and, where appropriate, an NDA first. Material sent to us before an NDA is in place is not treated as confidential by operation of these terms, although we will apply reasonable professional judgement to it.

3. This site is not a channel for urgent security matters

The contact form is a business enquiry form, checked during business hours. It is not monitored continuously and it must not be used to report an active security incident, a suspected breach, or anything else that is time-critical.

To be unambiguous about what we are and are not:

• We are not an incident response provider. We do not offer emergency response, breach containment, digital forensics under time pressure, or a call-out service.
• We are not a security operations centre or a managed detection and response provider. We do not monitor systems, watch alert queues, or provide eyes-on-glass coverage.
• We offer no round-the-clock availability, no on-call rotation, no hotline, and no response-time service level of any kind in connection with this website.

Our work is scheduled project and retained advisory engagements, performed during business hours against an agreed plan. If you are dealing with an active incident, stop and engage a dedicated incident response firm that holds itself out as providing that service. We will not be able to help you inside the timeframe you need, and treating this form as an escalation route could cost you time you do not have.

If you have found a security issue in this website itself, that is genuinely useful to us and we would like to hear about it. Use the contact form, pick "Other", and give us enough detail to reproduce it. We do not run a paid bug bounty and we have not published a formal disclosure policy, but we will not treat a good-faith report as a hostile act, and we will tell you what we did about it.

4. No professional advice

The content of this site is general information about the kinds of work we do. It is not security advice, legal advice, compliance advice or an assessment of your environment, and it is not a substitute for an engagement in which we actually look at your systems. Every environment differs, and nothing here has been written with yours in mind. Do not act, or decline to act, on the strength of anything published here.

5. Acceptable use

You may read this site, share links to it, and contact us through it. You may not:

• Submit false, impersonated or automated form submissions, or attempt to defeat the anti-spam measures.
• Use the contact form to send unsolicited commercial messages, recruitment approaches or vendor pitches.
• Attempt to gain unauthorised access to the site or its underlying infrastructure, or to disrupt its availability.
• Scrape the site at a rate or volume that degrades it for other people.
• Use any part of the site or its content to train a model, or to reproduce it as your own marketing material.

We may block or rate-limit any address that abuses the form, and we log the IP address of each submission for that purpose. See the privacy notice.

6. Intellectual property

The design, copy, code, generated artwork and marks on this site are ours or are licensed to us, and are protected by copyright and related rights. You may not copy, reproduce or adapt them other than for the ordinary purpose of viewing and sharing the site, without our written permission.

The typeface used here is Space Grotesk, licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1; the licence is included in the site's assets. Any third-party names referred to on this site belong to their respective owners and their use does not imply endorsement, affiliation or certification.

7. Third-party services and links

This site is hosted on Cloudflare Pages and uses Cloudflare Turnstile for anti-spam and Resend for email delivery. Their use is described in the privacy notice. Their availability is outside our control, and if any of them is unavailable the contact form may not work.

Where we link to a third-party site, we do not control it and we do not endorse it or take responsibility for its content.

8. Disclaimers

The site is provided on an "as is" and "as available" basis. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or free of harmful components, and we do not warrant that the information on it is complete, current or fit for any particular purpose. We may change, suspend or withdraw any part of it at any time without notice.

To the fullest extent permitted by North Carolina law, we disclaim all implied warranties, including any implied warranty of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, and non-infringement. Some jurisdictions do not allow the exclusion of certain implied warranties, so parts of this section may not apply to you.

9. Limitation of liability

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud or fraudulent misrepresentation, or for any other liability that cannot lawfully be excluded.

Subject to that, and to the extent permitted by law, we are not liable for any loss of profit, loss of business, loss of data, or any indirect or consequential loss arising from your use of, or inability to use, this website or from reliance on anything published on it.

Because this website is provided free of charge and creates no engagement, our total aggregate liability arising out of or relating to your use of it is limited to one hundred US dollars ($100). This clause applies to this website only and does not affect the liability terms of any signed engagement agreement, which stand on their own.

10. Changes, governing law and contact

We may update these terms. The version published here at the time you use the site is the version that applies, and the date at the top tells you when it last changed.

These terms and any dispute arising from them are governed by the laws of the State of North Carolina, without regard to its conflict-of-laws rules. The state and federal courts located in Cabarrus County, North Carolina have exclusive jurisdiction, and you consent to venue there.

Questions about these terms: use the contact form.