Building a “Recovery First” Cyber Resiliency Strategy

With cyberattacks becoming the new norm for enterprises of all sizes, organizational leaders are adjusting their approach to cybersecurity and cyber resiliency to address the inevitability of cyber attacks. Building a robust cyber resilience strategy that ensures a fast, effective recovery is quickly becoming a top priority for organizations across industries. To maintain business continuity and data security, CISOs and CIOs are becoming increasingly involved in challenging their organizations' ability to identify and restore clean data as quickly and effectively as possible. As a result, it’s in every organization’s best interest to have a coordinated plan for cyber resiliency.

Futuriom, working with Index Engines, has prepared this Leadership Brief to guide you toward a modern ransomware recovery strategy. In this Leadership Brief, we’ll talk about how the ransomware landscape has changed and why you need a new strategy focused on the integrity of your data, so that you are prepared for the fastest recovery possible.

Why a New Approach Is Needed

High-profile cyberattacks are on the rise and so is the growing number of challenges in recovering from them, so you might just assume an attack on an organization is inevitable and ask yourself: What kind of steps need to be taken for the fastest recovery to minimize losses? What’s the plan?

The truth is that a ransomware attack is inevitable. Ransomware has evolved far beyond the blunt-force encryption tactics of the past. In earlier attacks, adversaries would simply encrypt as many files as possible with a well-known algorithm and demand payment. But now ransomware variants stealthily corrupt data using techniques like intermittent encryption—encrypting only small portions of files so compression or entropy-based detection measures are defeated.

Attackers may also deploy shadow encryption approaches, which include several different techniques designed to evade detection and recovery efforts, including stealthy byte-level encryption. With these types of attacks, the attackers are either encoding corrupted data or performing encryption operations in memory rather than on disk, specifically to circumvent conventional backup-recovery systems and detection tools that monitor disk-level file changes.

Moving Beyond Prevention

With these advances in attack techniques and vectors, many professionals have concluded that focusing on stopping the attacks is not enough—because an attack is inevitable. A prevention-only mindset is akin to kicking the can down the curb, until the day arrives where your organization is targeted by a ransomware threat your defenses weren’t built to combat.

Moving from a prevention-only mindset to a recovery-first posture requires using advanced technology to track and control data integrity, including detecting hidden corruption at the content level, reflecting how attackers are now using advanced technology to hide their tracks.

Working with Index Engines, Futuriom has been analyzing the state of ransomware detection and prevention. We have put together this Leadership Brief to help our audience define and build the best detection and response strategy.

Key things you will learn in this Leadership Brief:

Adapting to advanced ransomware threats: How you can prepare for and respond to modern ransomware techniques that evade detection.
Why your organization needs a shared resiliency strategy.
Why you need a shared strategy and budget for ransomware protection.
Addressing data integrity in the face of the most sophisticated ransomware attacks.
How to address production storage and backups for complete resiliency.
Building out and measuring resiliency with KPIs and other data.