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Detonation Point is where cyber risk stops being an abstract headline and becomes an operational reality. In a recent episode presented by Elastio, host Matt O’Neill sat down with cloud security expert Costas Kourmpoglou at Spike Reply UK to unpack a hard truth many organizations only learn after an incident: Ransomware doesn’t succeed because attackers are smarter; it succeeds because recovery fails. Ransomware Is an Industry Early ransomware operations were vertically integrated. The same group wrote the malware, gained access, deployed it, negotiated payment, and laundered funds. That model is gone. Today’s ransomware ecosystem resembles a supply chain: Developers build ransomware toolingInitial access brokers sell credentialsAffiliates deploy attacksNegotiators manage extortionSeparate actors handle payments and laundering This “Ransomware-as-a-Service” model lowers the barrier to entry and scales attacks globally. No one really needs expert technical skills. They just need access and opportunity. How Daily Mistakes Set Ransomware in Motion Ransomware became dominant for a straightforward reason: it pays. Despite headlines about zero-day exploits, most ransomware campaigns still begin with mundane failures: Reused credentialsPhishing emailsThird-party access The uncomfortable reality is that most organizations already assume breaches, yet design security as if prevention is enough. In this Detonation Point podcast, Costas noted, “Many teams over-invest in stopping the first mistake and under-invest in what happens after that mistake inevitably occurs.” Attackers don’t rush. Once inside, they: Observe quietly and use native tools to blend in (“living off the land”)Map systems and privilegesIdentify backups and recovery paths Ransomware often detonates months after initial access and long after backups have quietly captured infected data. But Why Paying the Ransom Rarely Works Ransomware payments are often justified as the “cheapest option.” But data tells a different story: Recovery success after payment is worse than a coin flipPayments may violate sanctions lawsData is often not fully restored or released anyway As Costas put it, “If you’re willing to gamble on paying the ransom, you might as well invest that money in resilience, where the odds are actually in your favor.” One of the most critical insights from the conversation was this: If your business cannot operate, that is not just a cybersecurity failure, it’s a business failure. If your plan assumes everything else still works, it’s not a plan. And, if ransomware detonated tonight, do you know which recovery path would save you, and which ones would make things worse? Because when ransomware stops being theoretical, only validated recovery determines the outcome. This blog is adapted from the Detonation Point podcast presented by Elastio.

GuardDuty’s release of malware scanning on AWS Backup is an important enhancement to the AWS ecosystem, reflecting growing industry recognition that inspecting backup data has become a core pillar of cyber resilience. But real-world incidents show that ransomware often leaves no malware behind, making broader detection capabilities for encryption and zero-day attacks increasingly essential. Across industries, there are countless examples of enterprises with premium security stacks in place - EDR/XDR, antivirus scanners, IAM controls - still suffering extended downtime after an attack because teams couldn’t reliably identify an uncompromised recovery point when it mattered most. That’s because ransomware increasingly employs fileless techniques, polymorphic behavior, living-off-the-land tactics, and slow, stealthy encryption. These campaigns often reach backup andreplicated copies unnoticed, putting recovery at risk at the very moment organizations dependon it. As Gartner puts it: Modern ransomware tactics bypass traditional malware scanners, meaning backups may appear ‘clean’ during scans but prove unusable when restored. Equip your recovery environment with advanced capabilities that analyze backup data using content-level analytics and data integrity validation.”— Gartner, Enhance Ransomware Cyber Resilience With A Secure Recovery Environment, 2025 This is the visibility gap Elastio was designed to close. In this post, we walk through how Elastio’s data integrity validation works alongside AWS GuardDuty to support security and infrastructure teams through threat detection all the way to recovery confidence and why integrity validation has become essential in the age of identity-based and fileless attacks. What is AWS GuardDuty? AWS GuardDuty is a managed threat detection service that continuously monitors AWS environments for malicious or suspicious activity. It analyzes signals across AWS services, including CloudTrail, VPC Flow Logs, DNS logs, and malware protection scans, and produces structured security findings. GuardDuty integrates natively with Amazon EventBridge, which means every finding can be consumed programmatically and routed to downstream systems for automated response. For this integration, we focus on GuardDuty malware findings, including: Malicious file findings in S3Malware detections in EC2 environments These findings are high-confidence triggers that indicate potential compromise and warrant immediate validation of recovery data. Learn more about GuardDuty. Why a GuardDuty Finding Should Trigger Recovery Validation Malware detection is important, but it is no longer sufficient to validate data recoverability. Identity-based attacks dominate cloud breaches Today’s attackers increasingly rely on stolen credentials rather than exploits. With valid identities, they can: Use legitimate AWS APIsAccess data without dropping malwareBlend into normal operational behavior In these scenarios, there may be nothing malicious to scan, yet encryption or tampering can still occur. Fileless and polymorphic ransomware evade signatures Many ransomware families: Run entirely in memoryContinuously mutate their payloadsAvoid writing recognizable artifacts to disk Signature-based scanners may report “clean,” even as encryption spreads. Zero-day ransomware has no signatures By definition, zero-day ransomware cannot be detected by known signatures until after it has already caused damage - often widespread damage. The result is a dangerous failure mode: backups that scan clean but restore encrypted or corrupted data. Why Integrity Validation Changes the Outcome Elastio approaches ransomware from the impact side. Instead of asking only “is malware present?”, Elastio validates: Whether encryption has occurredWhat data was impactedWhen encryption startedWhich recovery points are still safe to restore The timeline above reflects a common real-world pattern: Initial access occurs quietlyEncryption begins days or weeks laterBackups continue, unknowingly capturing encrypted dataThe attack is only discovered at ransom time Without integrity validation, teams cannot know with confidence that their backups will work when they need them. This intelligence transforms a GuardDuty finding from an alert into an actionable recovery decision. Using GuardDuty as the Trigger for Recovery Validation Elastio’s new GuardDuty integration automatically initiates data integrity scans when GuardDuty detects suspicious or malicious activity. Instead of stopping at alerts, the integration immediately answers the implied next question: Did this incident affect our data, and can we recover safely? By validating backups and recovery assets in response to GuardDuty findings, Elastio reduces response time, limits attacker leverage, and enables faster, more confident recovery decisions. Architecture Overview At a high level: GuardDuty generates a malware findingThe finding is delivered to EventBridgeEventBridge routes the event into a trusted sender EventBusElastio’s receiver EventBus accepts events only from that senderElastio processes the finding and starts a targeted scanTeams receive recovery-grade intelligenceIncluding:Ransomware detection resultsFile- and asset-level impactLast known clean recovery pointOptional forwarding to SIEM or Security Hub The critical design constraint: trusted senders Each Elastio customer has a dedicated Receiver EventBus. For security reasons, that receiver only accepts events from a single allowlisted Sender EventBus ARN. This design ensures: Strong tenant isolationNo event spoofingClear security boundaries To support scale, customers can route many GuardDuty sources (multiple accounts, regions, or security setups) into that single sender bus. Elastio enforces trust at the receiver boundary. End-to-End Flow Step 1: GuardDuty detects malware GuardDuty identifies a malicious file or suspicious activity in S3 or EC2 and emits a finding. Step 2: EventBridge routes the finding Native EventBridge integration allows customers to filter and forward only relevant findings. Step 3: Sender EventBus enforces trust All GuardDuty findings flow through the designated sender EventBus, which represents the customer’s trusted identity. Step 4: Elastio receives and buffers events The Elastio Receiver EventBus routes events into an internal queue for resilience and burst handling. Step 5: Elastio validates recovery data Elastio maps the finding to impacted assets and initiates scans that analyze both malware indicators and ransomware encryption signals. Step 6: Recovery-grade results Teams receive actionable results: Ransomware detectionFile-level impactLast known clean recovery pointOptional forwarding to SIEM or Security Hub What This Enables for Security and Recovery Teams By combining GuardDuty and Elastio, organizations gain: Faster response triggered by high-signal findingsEarly detection of ransomware encryption inside backupsReduced downtime and data lossConfidence that restores will actually workAudit-ready evidence for regulators, insurers, and leadership Supported Today S3 malware findingsEC2 malware findings EBS-specific handling is in progress and will be added as it becomes available. Why This Matters in Practice In most ransomware incidents, the challenge isn’t identifying a security signal - it’s understanding whether that signal corresponds to meaningful data impact, and what it implies for recovery. Security and infrastructure teams often find themselves piecing together information across multiple tools to assess whether encryption or corruption has reached backups or replicated data. That assessment takes time, and during that window, recovery decisions are delayed or made conservatively. By using GuardDuty findings as a trigger for integrity validation, customers introduce earlier visibility into potential data impact. When suspicious activity is detected, Elastio provides additional context around whether recovery assets show signs of encryption or corruption, and which recovery points appear viable. This doesn’t replace incident response processes or recovery testing, but it helps teams make better-informed decisions sooner, particularly in environments where fileless techniques and identity-based attacks limit the effectiveness of traditional malware scanning. Extending GuardDuty From Detection Toward Recovery Readiness GuardDuty plays a critical role in surfacing high-confidence security findings. Elastio extends that signal into the recovery domain by validating the integrity of data organizations may ultimately depend on to restore operations. Together, they help teams bridge the gap between knowing an incident may have occurred and assessing recovery readiness, with supporting evidence that can be shared across security, infrastructure, and leadership teams. For organizations already using GuardDuty, this integration provides a practical way to connect detection workflows with recovery validation without changing existing security controls or response ownership. Watch our discussion: Understanding Elastio & AWS GuardDuty Malware Scanning for AWS Backup An open conversation designed to answer customer questions directly and help teams understand how these technologies work together to strengthen recovery posture. How signature-based malware detection compares to data integrity validationReal-world scenarios where behavioral and encryption-based detection mattersHow Elastio extends visibility, detection, and recovery assurance across AWS, Azure, and on-prem environmentsAn early look at Elastio’s new integration launching at AWS re:Invent

When Machines Become Identities: The Blind Spot Undermining Zero Trust and How Data Resilience Closes the Gap

By Elastio Product Team

By Elastio Product Team

Hunting and Defeating EDR-Evading Threats and Machine-Identity Attacks

Modern ransomware deletes its tracks, leaving only encrypted data behind. Learn why malware scans miss the real threat, and what detects it.

How Elastio Turns Detection Into Proven Ransomware Readiness

Elastio today announced the launch of its new Managed “Provable Recovery” Service, enabling enterprise-level ransomware recovery assurance - with no additional operational burden. Addressing a Critical Security Gap Ransomware actors continue to exploit a missing control in enterprise security architectures: unverified backups. As AI-driven attacks evolve and use advanced tactics such as polymorphic ransomware, fileless malware, and intermittent encryption, organizations are discovering that data is being silently compromised and replicated across disaster recovery environments, leaving no clean copy to restore when ransomware attacks. Without provable recoveries, boards and shareholders face unquantifiable risk, extended downtimes, and mounting regulatory pressure under DORA, HIPAA, and NYDFS. For today’s CIOs and CISOs, the mandate is clear: enterprises must continuously prove they can recover from ransomware with uncompromised data. Protecting Revenue, Reputation, and RecoveryWith Elastio’s “Provable Recovery” Managed Service, organizations can now achieve ransomware recovery assurance without operational overhead. Delivered and managed by Elastio’s ransomware experts, this service extends the proven power of Elastio’s platform to deliver continuous, validated recoverability as a turnkey outcome. Enterprise-Level Data Integrity Validation and Last-Known Clean Assurance: The Elastio platform continuously validates the integrity of your backup and recovery data. Elastio experts operate and monitor the platform end-to-end, delivering real-time findings, expert oversight, and continuous confirmation of the last-known clean recovery point. Accelerated ROI through expert-led deployment and management: Elastio experts deploy, configure, and fully operationalize the platform to a weaponized state - finely tuned around your environment, datasets, and recovery objectives. This hands-on approach accelerates time-to-value and ensures your protection is optimized from day one.Active Threat Monitoring and Recovery Guidance:Get direct access to Elastio’s trusted Incident Response team, relied on by global enterprises for ransomware threat intelligence. Our experts proactively monitor your Elastio-protected environment for signs of threat activity and provide actionable guidance to help you respond quickly and recover with confidence.Predictable, All-Inclusive Operational Costs:Simple onboarding and transparent, month-to-month pricing mean you can activate continuous recovery assurance in hours. No upfront fees. No lock-ins. Costs scale predictably with your data footprint, keeping protection aligned with your growth.Audit Ready Recovery Compliance: Every validation produces verifiable evidence of data integrity: documentation you can share with auditors, boards, insurers, and regulators to demonstrate resilience against ransomware and data corruption. The result: assurance you can measure, prove, and stand behind. “Recovery assurance has become a requirement for every enterprise, but not every team has the resources or expertise to manage it,” said Naj Husain, CEO of Elastio. “With our Managed ‘Provable Recovery’ Service, we’re changing that. We give enterprises expert-led assurance that their recovery data is clean and recoverable without adding operational burden. It is confidence in recovery, delivered as a service.”Elastio is live on the AWS Marketplace. To help organizations start 2026 with confidence, Elastio is offering new annual-license customers one month free* when activated before December 31, 2025. For more information, visit www.elastio.com or visit us at AWS re:Invent.

How deep data integrity validation eliminated ransomware risk and strengthened cyber resilience on AWS

Matt ONeil 5OH and Stephen Dougherty, Principal Investigator at Dougherty Intelligence and Investigations

As 2025 winds down, every C-suite leader faces the same question: Can we recover tomorrow if we’re hit today? Ransomware is evolving faster than most defenses. Attackers now go straight for the backups—the very systems meant to save you. Too many organizations discover too late that their “safety net” has already been compromised. Enter 2026 confident in your ability to withstand and recover from an attack. “Before Elastio, recovery was guesswork; we were restoring blindly and hoping backups were clean. Now we know they are. Elastio was operational in days, not weeks, delivering immediate ROI with verified recovery assurance and less audit friction. When the board asks, ‘Can we recover tomorrow if we’re hit today?’ I have the confidence and proof to say "Yes." The proof is built into our daily operations.” - CISO, Financial Services The time to act is now. The cost of waiting? Measured in millions, and in reputational damage, lost customers, lost data, and on and on. Every Day You Wait, Risk Increases: Ransomware attacks are up 80% year over year, and backup data is the #1 target. Elastio detects and removes infected backups before attackers weaponize them—so recovery becomes proactive, not reactive.Be Protected by the Weekend: Elastio’s agentless, SaaS-based deployment integrates seamlessly with your existing backup and cloud environments. You can be fully operational in under 48 hours—no new infrastructure, no downtime.Turn Recovery from Guesswork into a Guarantee: Without proof of clean recovery points, restoring data is a gamble. Elastio pinpoints the last known clean point so you can restore with certainty, not luck.The Cost of Waiting Is Measured in Millions: The average ransomware recovery costs $4.5M and nearly a month of downtime. Elastio mitigates that risk at a fraction of the cost. The ROI is immediate—and measurable.Compliance Deadlines Don’t Pause for Breaches: Regulators, including SEC, NYDFS, DORA, and MAS TRM, now demand verifiable proof of recoverability. Elastio delivers continuous, automated evidence of clean backups—reducing audit friction and regulatory risk.Backups Are the New Battlefield: Attackers target the recovery process itself. Elastio detects encryption patterns, dormant malware, and hidden payloads that traditional EDR tools miss before they spread.Strengthen the AWS Foundation You Already Own: Elastio runs natively within AWS allowing for simplifying your deployment (no new console, no new agents, no disruption). You enhance resilience without adding complexity.Stop Planning, Start Protecting: The organizations hit hardest are the ones that planned to act later. Ransomware resilience isn’t a Q2 initiative—it’s a right-now requirement.Give Leadership Real Confidence: Boards and CISOs want proof, not promises. Elastio provides verifiable integrity reports—evidence your backups are clean and your recovery is trustworthy.Transfer the Risk, Today: Within a week, Elastio can validate your environment, protect your backups, and deliver continuous evidence of clean recovery points. Don’t carry this risk into 2026. Enter 2026 Confident Ransomware Resilience Can’t Wait: Ransomware resilience isn’t just a security decision—it’s a leadership decision. Validate your recovery, protect your brand, and walk into 2026 with confidence—not uncertainty.