Security Lockdown Mode is PrivateNexus's automated, tiered response to real security signals — escalating containment without waiting for a human to be at a keyboard, while keeping the most disruptive response strictly human-gated.
Tiers escalate in strict order — Alert → Soft → Hard → Full — and only move upward automatically. Stepping back down always requires a deliberate action, never happens on its own.
No enforcement. A dashboard banner plus your existing Ntfy/email alert channels — this tier is purely "you should look at this."
Light containment — real action, but scoped and reversible, subject to the same cooldown logic as any other governed action.
Real containment — can stop affected containers automatically. Every action Hard tier takes still goes through the same blast-radius and blocklist checks as any other action in PrivateNexus; this tier does not get a bypass just because it's automated.
The most severe response. Full tier has no automatic trigger — it can only be activated manually, and only by an account with breakglass-level access, the highest role in the system. If Hard tier isn't containing an active incident, PrivateNexus will recommend escalating to Full prominently on the dashboard — but a human always has to be the one who pulls that trigger.
Automated response is genuinely useful for the first three tiers, where the blast radius is bounded and reversible. The most disruptive action is deliberately kept out of the automation's reach — it's there for a human to use in a real emergency, not for a false positive to trigger unattended.