Resilient Rebound: How to Recover from a Cyberattack

overview

Cyber Recovery

Cyberattacks may be an inescapable reality for enterprises, but with a strategic cyber recovery approach, businesses can emerge stronger and more secure than ever.

Facing an estimated 2,244 cyberattacks daily – or one attack every 39 seconds – technology and security leaders struggle to safeguard their environments, assets, data, and customers against determined, malicious bad actors and a relentlessly evolving threat landscape. But in the world of cybersecurity, it’s not always about how hard you get hit. It’s about how hard you get hit and keep moving forward.

For technology and security leaders, that means devising a robust cyber recovery strategy that not only fortifies their environment against attacks but also facilitates a swift, secure recovery and return to normal business operations. Cyber threats continue to top the list of business concerns among the C-suite, with 75% of executives saying they represent moderate or serious risk.

According to Commvault and GigaOm’s Cyber Recovery Readiness Report, 83% of 1,000 global leaders said they experienced a material security breach, 55% reported they are not fully confident they could recover systems and data following a major incident, and 42% admitted they lack clarity on who is responsible for cyber resilience and recovery.

These data points and countless others underscore the urgent need for an exceptional cyber recovery strategy. To mitigate risk and maintain secure operations, enterprise businesses must adopt an approach of recovering in a cleanroom, where they can isolate threats, scrutinize the environment for infection, and provide a speedy return to a secure state.

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The Cleanroom Imperative

Cleanroom data recovery goes beyond traditional disaster or data recovery approaches by designating a separate, controlled space to identify the root cause of security issues. The cleanroom isolates the problem in a segregated area, prevents any infected systems from spreading, and reduces the risk of data being compromised.

To start, a cleanroom is a secure, isolated environment that protects sensitive data from external threats. It is used to analyze digital evidence related to cyber incidents, breaches, crimes, or attacks. It enables security organizations to expedite investigations into incidents and speed the mean time to recovery for an organization.

In some cases, cleanroom data recovery is delivered by a cloud-based platform that allows for testing recovery points before fully restoring data to production systems. The isolated environment serves multiple purposes by keeping infected systems separate, providing space to scrutinize the environment, and preventing infection to broader systems.

Recovering to a cleanroom involves several capabilities combined to mitigate risk to the environment.

Immutable backups: Storing an air-gapped, immutable copy of data to ensure it remains untouched by attackers and provides a reliable recovery point. An immutable backup is a file that cannot be altered in any way, designed to prevent bad actors or administrators from changing the data. Immutable backups also are intended to eliminate the possibility of data being deleted. Immutable backups protect against natural disasters and human error, but more importantly an immutable backup promises that even if an environment is compromised, the data will remain secure.

Isolated testing environment: Utilizing a cleanroom where you can test and validate the integrity of backups before restoring them to production, minimizing the risk of reinfection. The segregated area provides a safe and isolated environment for testing cyber recovery plans, conducting forensic analysis, and providing continuous business if a breach does occur.

Automated recovery processes: Leveraging automated tools to quickly identify compromised systems and restore data from clean backups, which minimizes downtime. Following an attack, organizations want to resume business operations, but the process is slowed by the many applications that must be rebuilt in a step-by-step, time-consuming approach. Automation can more quickly restore an organization’s entire cloud application and data environment, including all the necessary cloud infrastructure configurations, in a much timelier manner.

Data classification: Implementing robust data classification policies categorizes data based on its sensitivity level, for instance financial data, personally identifiable information (PII), or intellectual property. This lets security leaders focus on recovering critical data first, providing minimal disruption to business operation. By using discovery tools to scan an environment, security teams can identify sensitive data across different systems and analyze file content, metadata, and access patterns to accurately classify the data. This information will help speed recovery time and keep critical systems available for business operations.

Early threat detection: Identifying and containing potential cyberattacks before they encrypt or exfiltrate critical data enables faster and cleaner recovery from ransomware or other malicious attacks by isolating clean data copies and minimizing damage to production systems. Providing an early warning system proactively protects data and minimizes the impact of a breach by isolating data copies affected by an attack. By identifying malicious activity before significant damage occurs, enterprises can respond immediately and begin mitigation strategies.

Security awareness training: Conduct regular security awareness training sessions to educate employees on the importance of cyber hygiene and security measures.

Cyber recovery provides organizations with powerful tools for comprehensive testing, forensic analysis, and production failover. By adopting cleanroom data recovery, organizations can confidently test their cyber recovery plans, identify and remediate vulnerabilities, and maintain business continuity in the face of cyberattacks.

Resilience

From Recovery to Resilience

Enterprise organizations must do more than recovery; they must build resilient environments that can not only withstand an attack, but also can recover without data loss, system damage, or financial pain. Effective cyber recovery can help organizations avoid financial losses, reputational damage, and legal action that can result from a malicious cyberattack.

Cyber recovery should be considered an ongoing process that can be continuously finetuned and honed as the organization grows more and more resilient. A cyber-resilient organization can adapt to known and unknown challenges, responding to threats and recovering from attacks in an expedited manner. By conducting thorough risk assessments, implementing strong security measures, creating an incident response plan, and regularly training employees on cybersecurity best practices, enterprises can quickly adapt to evolving cyber threats and proactively adjust their security strategies.

Enterprise organizations must continuously test their cyber recovery approach to allow a frictionless, rapid return to business operations. A strategic approach of recovering to a cleanroom will help businesses advance their journey to becoming a cyber-resilient business.

What is Cleanroom Recovery?

Cleanroom Recovery is a specialized data recovery process that ensures the secure and reliable retrieval of critical information from damaged storage devices in environments where data contamination poses a significant risk.

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What is Disaster Recovery?

Disaster recovery (DR) is the process of restoring an organization’s IT infrastructure and operations after a major disruption or disaster. The goal of disaster recovery is to minimize the impact of a disruptive event and restore normal operations as quickly as possible to minimize the impact on the organization’s business processes and reputation.

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