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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

Hunting and Defeating EDR-Evading Threats and Machine-Identity Attacks As enterprises accelerate cloud transformation, containerization, AI adoption, microservices, and automation, a subtle yet profound shift is reshaping the cyber threat landscape. Traditional endpoint-based detection approaches are no longer sufficient. Attackers are increasingly evading EDR, while simultaneously exploiting a rapidly expanding universe of machine identities such as service accounts, certificates, API keys, and ephemeral workload tokens. This creates a new, invisible attack surface that is often unmonitored, ungoverned, and misunderstood. To defend effectively, organizations must evolve. The new model brings together endpoint awareness, identity intelligence, and data-layer resilience to expose threats that would otherwise remain invisible. The EDR Blind Spot Is Widening Endpoint Detection and Response has been the backbone of enterprise defense. But adversaries have learned to systematically bypass it through techniques that interfere with telemetry, suppress alerts, operate from memory, or shift their activity into systems or layers where EDR agents cannot run. Some threat groups have deployed tooling that disables endpoint monitoring components entirely, allowing operations to continue with little or no visibility for defenders. At the same time, many critical infrastructure components do not support EDR at all. Hypervisors, storage appliances, virtual machine management systems, and specialized cloud services often sit outside traditional endpoint protections. Attackers increasingly target these layers because activity there blends in with normal operations and rarely triggers alarms. As a result, relying solely on endpoint-centric detection creates blind spots that grow wider as modern infrastructure becomes more distributed. The Explosion of Machine Identities and the Risks They Introduce While EDR evasion grows more sophisticated, another trend has emerged in parallel: the exponential rise of machine identities. These are non-human actors created by automation pipelines, containers, microservices, serverless functions, AI agents, DevOps tooling, and cloud services. Machine identities now outnumber human identities in most cloud-forward enterprises by enormous margins. They often carry privileged permissions, access sensitive data paths, or control critical infrastructure functions. Unlike human accounts, these identities rarely follow standardized onboarding, governance, audit, or lifecycle processes. Many are short-lived, created and destroyed automatically, leaving gaps in visibility. Others live far longer than intended because no one realizes they still exist. Attackers increasingly target these identities because compromising one can grant immediate and legitimate access to high-value systems or data. The activity of a hijacked machine identity blends in naturally with expected automation patterns, making detection difficult. In many cases, the identity itself becomes the persistence mechanism. Identity Becomes the New Perimeter These dynamics undermine a core assumption behind many security architectures: that identity governance is equivalent to human access control. In cloud-native enterprises, identity is now as much about workloads as it is about people. When machine identities are not continuously monitored, governed, and validated, they become powerful tools for stealthy lateral movement or data manipulation. This means identity has truly become the perimeter. But it is a perimeter that cannot be secured solely with human-centric tools. The Data Layer Is Where Invisible Threats Finally Become Visible Machine identities interact with data continuously. They create snapshots, move objects across storage tiers, generate logs, trigger analytics pipelines, replicate datasets, and run unattended processes. If one of these identities is compromised, the first signs of malicious activity often appear in the data layer itself. Unauthorized reads, unexpected modifications, corruption of snapshots, tampered metadata, irregular replication events, or the introduction of malicious content are often the earliest and most reliable indicators of attack. By the time endpoint or identity systems raise alerts, the attacker may have already altered data across multiple systems. This is why modern cyber resilience depends on the ability to continuously verify the integrity, security, and recoverability of data itself. A Modern Defense Model Addressing these emerging threats requires a multi-layered approach that blends identity, workload, and data-centric controls. First, all machine identities must be governed with the same rigor as human identities. This means complete inventory, lifecycle management, least-privilege enforcement, short-lived credential use, and continuous monitoring of identity behavior.Second, detection must expand beyond endpoints. Organizations need visibility into identity issuance, API usage, workload behavior, cloud control-plane activity, and infrastructure components that do not support traditional EDR.Third, data integrity must be continuously validated. Snapshots, backups, object data, and replicated datasets must be automatically and regularly inspected. Any unauthorized change or anomaly should be treated as a leading indicator of potential compromise.Fourth, Zero Trust principles must be deeply embedded in the machine and data layers. Verification is no longer only about authenticating a user. It is about verifying the legitimacy of every process, every identity, and every piece of data flowing through the enterprise. Why This Approach Is Strategic Adversaries are adapting quickly. They no longer need to compromise a human identity or bypass every endpoint. They can operate quietly within automation systems, exploit permissions given to machine identities, or target data itself as the first point of manipulation. By addressing machine identity governance and data integrity together, organizations reduce the inherent weaknesses of endpoint-only detection. They gain a defensive architecture that detects threats earlier, responds more effectively, and ensures business continuity even under active attack. The combination of EDR evasion and machine-identity exploitation represents one of the most significant emerging risks to modern enterprises. Attackers are learning to operate invisibly, bypassing traditional controls and embedding themselves in the automation and data layers where detection is weakest. To win in this environment, security teams must shift their mindset. They must unmask the invisible by looking where attackers now hide: in identities, in the control plane, and in the data itself. They must verify continuously, trust nothing implicitly, and safeguard the integrity of the information the business depends on. This is how modern organizations stay resilient. It is how they transform uncertainty into strength. And it is how they defeat adversaries who no longer need to be seen to be dangerous. This is the gap Elastio is built to close. Schedule a review. 3 Key Takeaways EDR alone leaves growing visibility gapsMachine identities are the new attack surfaceData integrity becomes the ultimate detection layer

AI-Ready & Ransomware-Proof FSx for NetApp ONTAP Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP (FSxN) has become the gold standard for high-performance cloud storage, combining the agility of AWS with the data management power of NetApp. Today, this infrastructure is more critical than ever. As unstructured data volumes explode and enterprises race to feed Generative AI models, FSxN has evolved into the engine room for innovation. It holds the massive datasets that fuel your AI insights and drive business logic. You cannot build trusted AI on unverified data FSxN delivers the trusted, high-performance platform your enterprise relies on. But true trust requires more than uptime—it requires integrity. As enterprise architectures evolve, so do the threats targeting them. The sheer scale of unstructured data creates a massive blind spot where ransomware can hide, silently corrupting data over weeks. If the data residing on your trusted storage is compromised, your AI models are being trained on poisoned assets. The Imperative: Verified Data for Trusted AI Today, Elastio is introducing comprehensive Ransomware Recovery Assurance for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP. We now provide a layered defense that validates the integrity of the data within your primary volumes, SnapMirror replicas, and AWS Backups, ensuring that your storage is not just available, but provably clean. The Three-Tier Defense for FSxN To understand where Elastio fits, we must look at the modern FSxN protection architecture. A resilient implementation typically relies on three layers : Primary Filer: Your active, high-performance workload.SnapMirror Replica: A near-real-time, read-only copy used for disaster recovery with low RPOs (e.g., 5 minutes).AWS Backup: A daily recovery point for long-term retention and compliance. Until now, verified recoverability across these layers was a blind spot. Elastio eliminates that uncertainty by integrating with the entire chain to validate data integrity before a crisis occurs. The Risk of Silent Corruption Ransomware attacks frequently begin subtly, bypassing perimeter defenses and modifying data blocks without triggering immediate alerts. If these corrupted blocks are replicated to your SnapMirror destination or archived into your AWS Backup vault, you aren't preserving your business—you are preserving the attack. Just having backups is not enough. To ensure resilience, you must answer three questions about your recovery points : Are they safe?Are they intact?Are they recoverable? Introducing Elastio Recovery Assurance for FSxN Elastio delivers agentless, automated verification for FSxN environments. Our platform connects to your infrastructure to perform deep-file inspection, providing : Behavioral Ransomware Detection: We identify encryption patterns that signature-based tools miss, including slow-rolling and obfuscated encryption.Insider Threat Detection: We detect malicious tampering or unauthorized encryption driven by compromised credentials.Corruption Validation: We identify unexpected data corruption that could render a backup unusable during a restore. This coverage spans the entire lifecycle. Elastio scans your SnapMirror replicas for immediate RPO validation and utilizes AWS Restore Testing to validate your AWS Backups without rehydrating production data. Complementing NetApp’s Native Defenses Elastio is designed to work with your existing security stack, not replace it. NetApp’s native Autonomous Ransomware Protection (ARP) is an excellent first line of defense, monitoring your production environment for suspicious activity in real-time. Elastio complements ARP by operating beyond the production path. We focus on the recovery chain, performing deep-dive analysis on your backups and replicas. If ARP flags a potential threat in production, Elastio allows you to instantly identify which historical recovery point is clean, verifiable, and safe to restore . Compliance: From "Prevention" to "Proof" Regulatory pressure is shifting. Frameworks like DORA, NYDFS, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS are moving away from simple backup retention mandates toward requirements for demonstrable recovery integrity. Auditors and cyber insurers no longer accept "we have backups" as an answer. They require proof that those backups can be restored. Elastio automates this reporting, providing a validated inventory of clean snapshots that satisfies the most stringent compliance and risk requirements. Recommended Architecture for Provable Recovery To achieve maximum resilience with FSxN, we recommend the following layered approach : Replicate: Use SnapMirror to maintain a secondary copy with a 5-minute RPO.Retain: Use AWS Backup to enforce retention policies.Validate:Run Elastio Hourly Scans on SnapMirror replicas to catch infection early.Run Elastio Restore Tests monthly on AWS Backups to verify your vault. Conclusion In the current threat landscape, ransomware is not a matter of if, but when. Your data is only protected if it can be recovered. With Elastio’s new support for Amazon FSx for NetApp ONTAP, you can move beyond checking a backup box and gain true recovery assurance. In just minutes per TB, you will know if your data is clean or compromised, and be ready to recover with confidence. 3 Key Takeaways AI Integrity Requires Clean Data As FSxN drives generative AI and unstructured data growth, silent corruption becomes a critical risk. Elastio prevents "poisoned" datasets by detecting corruption inside the storage layer.End-to-End Validation Elastio secures the entire FSxN lifecycle, providing deep inspection and clean recovery verification for primary volumes, SnapMirror replicas, and AWS Backups.The "Production and Recovery" Defense Elastio operates outside the production path to complement NetApp’s Autonomous Ransomware Protection (ARP), validating snapshots to ensure you always have a safe place to restore from.

The Immutability Blind Spot AWS Logically Air-Gapped (LAG) Vaults are a massive leap forward for cloud recovery assurance. They provide the isolation and immutability enterprises need to survive catastrophic cyber events. But immutability has a dangerous blind spot: it doesn’t distinguish between clean data and corrupted data. If ransomware encrypts your production environment and those changes replicate to your backup snapshots before they are moved to the vault, you are simply locking the malware into your gold-standard recovery archive. You aren’t preserving your business; you’re preserving the attack. Today, Elastio has closed that gap. We introduced a new integration with AWS LAG that ensures only provably clean recovery points enter your immutable vault. By combining our deep-file inspection with a new Automated Quarantine Workflow, we prevent infected data from polluting your recovery environment. The Risk: "Immutable Garbage In, Immutable Garbage Out" The core principle of modern resilience is simple: Immutable storage isn't enough—data integrity must be proven. Ransomware attackers are evolving. They no longer just encrypt production data; they target backup catalogs and leverage "slow burn" encryption strategies to corrupt snapshots over weeks or months. Standard signature-based detection tools often miss these storage-layer attacks because they are looking for executable files, not the mathematical signs of entropy and corruption within the data blocks themselves. If you copy an infected recovery point into an AWS LAG Vault and lock it with a compliance retention policy, you create a restoration loop: every time you attempt to recover, you re-infect the environment. The Elastio Solution: Verify, Then Vault Elastio has updated its recovery assurance platform to act as that gatekeeper. We utilize machine learning-powered ransomware encryption detection models designed specifically to catch advanced strains, including slow encryption, striped encryption, and obfuscated patterns. Here is the new workflow for AWS LAG customers: Ingest & Inspection: As workload backups or snapshots are generated, Elastio automatically inspects the data for signs of ransomware encryption and corruption.The Decision Engine: Based on the inspection results, the workflow forks immediately:Path A: The Clean Path. If the data is verified as clean, it is routed to the customer’s Immutable LAG Vault. Once there, it undergoes automated recovery testing on a set schedule to prove recoverability.Path B: The Infection Path. If data is flagged as infected, it is blocked from entering the clean LAG vault. Instead, the compromised snapshot is automatically routed to a Quarantine Vault, which can itself be configured as a separate Logically Air-Gapped Vault. Optionally, Elastio can trigger the deletion of the local copy immediately after the move to either the clean or quarantine vault is complete, eliminating the need to maintain local retention. Why This Matters for the Enterprise For CISOs, Cloud Architects, and Governance teams, this workflow shifts the posture from "hopeful" to "provable." Audit-Ready Compliance: Whether you are dealing with NYDFS, HIPAA, or cyber insurance requirements, you can now prove that your immutable archives are free of compromise.Reduced Incident Response Time: By automatically segregating infected data, IR teams don't have to waste time shifting through thousands of snapshots to find a clean version. Elastio points you directly to the last clean copy and the first infected copy.Cost Control: You stop paying for premium, immutable storage on data that is useless for recovery. Real-World Value Elastio delivers outcome-driven security. With this update, we provide: Provable Recovery: You don’t just think your backups will work; you have a verified, clean report to prove it.Ransomware Impact Detection: Identify the exact moment of infection to minimize data loss (RPO).Integrity Assurance: Validate that no tampering has occurred within the data before it becomes immutable. Take Control of Your Recovery Don't let your backup vault become a ransomware repository. Ensure that every recovery point stored in AWS LAG is verified, validated, and clean. 3 Key Takeaways Immutability != Integrity Locking unverified data creates a "restoration loop" where ransomware is preserved alongside your critical assets.The "Verify-Then-Vault" Gatekeeper Elastio sits upstream of your AWS LAG Vault, inspecting every recovery point. Only verified clean data is allowed to enter your gold-standard archive, ensuring it remains uncompromised.Automated Quarantine Infected snapshots are instantly routed to a secure Quarantine Vault for forensic analysis, isolating threats without contaminating your clean recovery environment or slowing down response teams.

The Blind Spot Undermining Zero Trust and How Data Resilience Closes the Gap Zero Trust has become the operating doctrine of modern cybersecurity. Every user, device, and request must be authenticated, authorized, and continuously verified. Yet one category has quietly slipped out of the spotlight: machine-generated identities. These are non-human actors created automatically inside cloud and DevOps environments. They orchestrate microservices, move data between layers, trigger automation pipelines, and run autonomous workloads at massive scale. Enterprises often have tens of thousands of these identities operating simultaneously. They are created instantly, granted permissions programmatically, perform sensitive actions by design, and then disappear minutes or hours later. Traditional identity governance, monitoring, and behavior analytics are poorly equipped to track them. This blind spot now represents one of the most significant and least understood risks in modern cloud security. What changed A few years ago, most enterprise identities represented people. Even service accounts typically mapped to long-lived hosts or well-understood roles. Today, a single cloud application can generate hundreds or thousands of ephemeral identities each day. Containers spin up, run a process, touch sensitive data, write to logs, make API calls, and then vanish. Serverless workloads generate identities for the duration of one function execution. CI systems create short-lived tokens that download source, push artifacts, and modify infrastructure. These identities have no inbox, no phone, and no human behavior pattern. They cannot use multi-factor authentication. They often hold elevated privileges because the default configuration for automation is convenience. And because lifecycle management is automated, they rarely appear in audit discussions until something has already gone wrong. Why attackers care For adversaries, this represents a perfect opportunity. Compromise no longer requires phishing a human being or bypassing endpoint security. Instead, they target a workload identity that exists only inside cloud automation. If that identity carries permissions to read object stores, launch instances, modify data, or request snapshots, an attacker inherits all of those capabilities instantly. Even more concerning, compromised machine identities blend seamlessly into normal operations. Their activity patterns are noisy, unpredictable, and highly variable. What looks like suspicious behavior from a human rarely looks suspicious from an automated process. This makes detection extraordinarily difficult. In this new threat model, attackers do not need persistence on a host. The identity itself is the persistence. The consequence of zero trust Zero Trust assumes that every request is robustly verified. But what happens when the requester is an ephemeral identity with no behavioral baseline, no user context, and essentially no ability to be challenged? The answer is simple. Zero Trust begins to break down. Identity is supposed to be the new perimeter. But machine identities operate outside the visibility of conventional identity governance. They change too quickly for manual oversight, they hold too many permissions for comfort, and they continuously interact with critical data paths. Enterprises must begin treating machine identities not as technical abstractions but as a primary security domain. The data layer is where the risk becomes real Machine identities do not steal credentials, escalate privileges, or exfiltrate information in the same way human adversaries do. Their impact is most visible in the data itself.This includes unauthorized reads of sensitive objects, modification of datasets, corruption of critical backups, injection of malicious content into pipelines, or the manipulation of metadata that governs data access and retention. Once data is changed, the downstream consequences propagate rapidly. Replication jobs copy the corrupted state. Analytics systems import compromised inputs. Backup systems preserve tainted versions. If machine identity misuse is not detected at the data layer, organizations may lose the ability to trust any copy of their environment.Identity management can fail. Permissions can drift. Automation pipelines can be hijacked. Developers can unintentionally create exposure through misconfigured roles. And adversaries can weaponize machine identities that every legacy control. What cannot fail is the integrity of the data that an organization relies upon to recover. CISOs are now recognizing that resilience is not simply about backup storage or snapshot retention. It is about guaranteeing that what you recover is trustworthy. It is about detecting identity misuse, not only by observing behavior, but by validating the safety and correctness of the data that those identities touch. Machine identity threats cannot always be contained at the identity layer. They must be caught at the data layer.As enterprises accelerate automation, the number of non-human identities will grow exponentially. This shift demands a new understanding of identity risk and a new appreciation for the role of data integrity in overall security posture. Zero Trust is essential. But without verifiable trust in the data itself, Zero Trust is incomplete. This is the gap Elastio is built to close. 3 Key Takeaways Machine identities are a growing Zero-Trust blind spotAttackers exploit ephemeral automation identities undetectedData-layer validation is critical for resilience

The Reality of Modern Ransomware Attacks This year, we helped a telecom services customer recover from a Qilin ransomware attack. Qilin is the most active ransomware group in 2025. When Elastio scanned our environment, something critical became clear: there was no malware left on the disk. The ransomware gang had already deleted their tools. What remained was purely the evidence of encryption, scrambled files and corrupted data structures spreading across their backups. This isn't an anomaly. It's the pattern. Today's top ransomware groups, including Qilin, LockBit, BlackCat, ALPHV, and Cl0p, all employ sophisticated obfuscation techniques: fileless attacks that operate in memory, polymorphic malware where every instance is different, and immediate cleanup where attack tools are deleted within minutes. By the time you're restoring from backups, the malware is often long gone. What you're left facing is encrypted data proliferating through your backup generations. Three Unique Gaps Elastio addresses 1. Detection Beyond Malware Signatures In our customer's Qilin attack, Elastio's encryption detection identified the exact backup where encryption began, pinpointing the last clean copy and enabling recovery in hours rather than days of trial and error. GuardDuty provides malware scanning, but malware scanning alone won't catch ransomware attacks where the malware has been removed, insider threats using legitimate encryption tools, backup corruption, or zero-day attacks with unknown variants. Elastio provides layered detection: Ransomware Encryption Detection: Detect ransomware encryption and identify the variant of ransomwareInsider Threat Detection: Unauthorized or suspicious encryption by insidersCorruption Detection: Detect any corruption in backupsMalware Detection: Known malicious files and signatures 2. Unified Multicloud Coverage Your data doesn't live in just AWS. GuardDuty's integration is AWS-specific, creating gaps if you operate across public cloud or hybrid environments. Elastio provides consistent protection across all your clouds—one platform, one console, uniform detection and policy enforcement everywhere your backups reside. 3. Expert Ransomware Response Support Every Elastio customer has complementary access to our Ransomware Response and Threat Intelligence team, experts who've handled incidents providing immediate triage, recovery guidance, and threat intelligence when every minute counts. Moving Forward AWS's integration of GuardDuty with AWS Backup validates what we've been advocating: backup security is infrastructure security. As malware scanning becomes table stakes, the question shifts to: "Are we detecting everything we need to detect? Do we have the support to respond effectively?" We’re hosting an upcoming webinar on on Tuesday, December 9 at 11:00 a.m. ET, Understanding Elastio & AWS GuardDuty Malware Scanning for AWS Backup focused on how Elastio works alongside GuardDuty Malware Protection for AWS Backup, including a walkthrough of our integration launching at AWS re:Invent.

Scan Backups with Amazon GuardDuty Malware Protection for AWS Backup Cybersecurity teams are under pressure: attackers are faster, stealthier, and increasingly targeting backups. Amazon’s announcement of GuardDuty Malware Protection for AWS Backup is an important step forward for cloud security teams. But while detection is essential, detection alone does not equal ransomware readiness. This is where the Elastio and GuardDuty integration becomes a force multiplier. From Alerts to Ransomware Readiness Security leaders understand this: alerts tell you what is happening, but they do not guarantee you can survive what happens next. Modern adversaries: Bypass prevention controlsEncrypt backupsHide inside trusted servicesLeave your environment looking healthy while recovery points are already corrupted With the new integration: GuardDuty detects anomalies, malware, compromised credentials, and suspicious API behaviorElastio responds automatically by scanning data for corruption, ransomware encryption, and malwareCompromised data is quarantinedClean recovery points are validated and preservedFindings are pushed to Security Hub, IR platforms, or SOAR workflows Elastio converts threat alerts into recovery assurance. You do not simply know something bad happened; you know your last clean copy is safe. What It Means for Your Security Teams GuardDuty provides threat visibility: It detects suspicious behaviors across S3, EC2, EBS, IAM, and other AWS services.Elastio provides proof of survivability: It verifies that your data is intact, unencrypted, unmodified, and recoverable. For Incident Response Teams Compromised data is automatically quarantinedElastio identifies the last known clean restore pointFile level forensics and malware details are surfaced instantlyTeams can investigate safely before triggering recovery For CISOs and CIOs A continuous security control that proves ransomware readinessIndependent validation that backups meet compliance, governance, and cyber insurance expectationsReduction in downtime by more than 90 percentRealizable 10 to 25 times ROI through faster, cleaner recovery This turns backup validation into a measurable resilience metric rather than a hope. Executive Summary Customer Pain: Security teams can detect threats, but they cannot tell if backups have already been corrupted. This forces IR teams and CISOs to guess about recovery integrity, slows down response, increases downtime, and creates compliance and audit gaps. Value Proposition:The GuardDuty and Elastio integration turns every detection event into automated recovery assurance. GuardDuty identifies suspicious behavior and Elastio validates the data integrity. Then, compromised data is quarantined, clean recovery points are verified, and detailed evidence is pushed to Security Hub and IR systems. IR teams gain clear, file-level intelligence and a confirmed clean restore point. CISOs receive continuous dashboards that prove recovery readiness, SLA compliance, and audit-ready documentation. Outcome: Customers move from “we detected something” to “we know exactly what is safe to recover and what to do.” This reduces downtime, eliminates recovery guesswork, strengthens compliance, and provides measurable resilience against ransomware.

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 Recovery With 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

The Relentless Evolution of Business Email Compromise Business Email Compromise, commonly known as BEC, remains the most persistent and costly form of cybercrime in the world. Despite years of awareness campaigns, technological advancements, and coordinated enforcement efforts, it continues to dominate the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center report each year. The reason is clear. BEC is simple to execute, highly adaptable, and extremely profitable. It does not depend on sophisticated malware or advanced hacking techniques. Instead, it exploits human trust and communication. At its foundation, BEC is a form of social engineering driven by information. Criminals gain access to or impersonate legitimate email accounts, posing as trusted executives, vendors, or clients. Victims are deceived into transferring funds or sharing sensitive data, resulting in enormous financial losses across both corporate and consumer sectors. Why BEC Persists BEC remains dominant because it is easy to conduct and yields significant returns. According to financial crime investigator Stephen Dougherty, “You can make $150,000 off a single attack. Pull off two, that is your year.” Modern fraudsters now use artificial intelligence tools to automate and refine their scams. They can produce flawless English, natural tone, and convincing messages in minutes. Even spoofed domains can be crafted to appear legitimate by using foreign characters that are visually identical to English letters. Combined with deepfake audio or voicemail, these communications appear authentic and reliable to unsuspecting targets. This convergence of technology and deception has made BEC one of the most efficient and damaging crimes in the digital age. A Global Criminal Enterprise BEC is no longer confined to individual scammers. It has evolved into a complex international enterprise built on specialization. Certain actors infiltrate and sell access to email accounts. Others operate extensive networks of money mules who move stolen funds. Organized groups then launder the proceeds through multiple layers of transactions. Organizations such as Black Axe and Yahoo Boys were among the earliest groups to industrialize this form of fraud. Their structure has since spread worldwide, giving rise to a “crime as a service” marketplace. In this ecosystem, compromised email accounts, bank access, and technical tools are bought and sold like commercial goods. This level of organization ensures that BEC continues to expand, drawing in new participants and perpetuating an endless cycle of financial exploitation. Human and Economic Consequences Behind every fraudulent email are real victims. Families lose their life savings, small businesses are forced to close, and individuals suffer emotional and psychological harm. Dougherty has described cases in which victims lost everything, including their homes, due to intercepted real estate transactions. In the most tragic examples, individuals have taken their own lives after realizing they were defrauded. “Business email compromise also kills people,” he explained. “Maybe not with a gun, but with despair.” Investigators and analysts working on these cases often experience what professionals refer to as secondary trauma. The emotional toll of repeatedly witnessing the consequences of financial victimization is significant, yet rarely acknowledged. Systemic Challenges The United States possesses strong financial oversight mechanisms, yet the national approach to combating fraud remains fragmented. Different agencies control different aspects of the response, and coordination is often limited. Public discourse tends to focus on banks, which represent the final stage of a fraudulent transaction. However, the true origin of most BEC cases lies within social media platforms, email providers, and domain registrars that allow fraudulent activity to proliferate. A centralized response is essential. Experts have proposed the creation of a National Anti Scam Center modeled after the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Such an organization would facilitate real time information sharing between law enforcement, financial institutions, and technology companies. It would enable immediate action to stop fraudulent transfers and recover stolen funds before they disappear overseas. The necessary technology and expertise are already available. What is missing is unified leadership and sustained commitment. The Road Ahead BEC is expected to become even more sophisticated in the coming years. Deepfakes will make impersonation effortless. Artificial intelligence will erase the telltale signs of deception. Real estate, supply chain, and corporate payment systems will remain attractive targets as transactions become faster and verification remains inconsistent. The most effective defense will combine strong verification processes, multi factor authentication, tokenization, and continuous education. However, traditional awareness efforts are no longer enough. Fraud prevention must evolve into storytelling and public engagement that resonate emotionally and visually. When people understand the human cost behind these crimes, awareness transforms into vigilance. That awareness can prevent the next victim from becoming a statistic. Top 3 Takeaways BEC thrives because it’s simple, adaptable, and lucrative. It's easy! BEC scams work because they’re simple, cheap, and based on trust, not hacking. One convincing email can net hundreds of thousands of dollars.AI and organized crime have supercharged BEC.Criminals now use AI to write perfect emails, fake voices (vishing), and realistic domains. It’s become an organized global business with people buying and selling access to hacked accounts and stolen money.Fragmented defense and lack of coordination fuel the problem. Law enforcement, banks, and tech companies are working separately instead of as one team. Experts say the U.S. needs a coordinated national effort to stop these scams and protect victims. These insights were explored in detail with Matt O'Neil during an episode of Detonation Point, sponsored by Elastio, featuring Stephen Dougherty of Dougherty Intelligence and Investigations. The discussion underscored an urgent reality. Until BEC is treated as a national crisis requiring coordinated prevention, enforcement, and education, both the financial losses and the human suffering will continue to grow.

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 is 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.