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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.

Elastio AWS Backup Quarantine Feature

Cyberattacks are evolving faster than traditional defenses. Gartner’s recent research note, “Enhance Ransomware Cyber Resilience With a Secure Recovery Environment” by Fintan Quinn, highlights a critical shift: relying solely on malware detection is no longer sufficient for safe recovery. “Most modern ransomware tactics bypass traditional malware scanners, meaning backups may appear ‘clean’ during scans but prove unusable when restored.” — Gartner, 2025 In other words, your backups may look healthy but still be compromised. Attackers increasingly target recovery systems, hiding fileless or memory-resident ransomware deep within snapshots and backups. Once encryption triggers, the damage extends not just to production data, but to the very safety nets organizations depend on. The New Standard: Advanced Validation Gartner advises that companies “equip recovery environments with advanced capabilities that analyze backup data using content-based analytics and data integrity validation.” In other words, These aren’t nice-to-have features—they’re now required for compliance and operational resilience under frameworks like ECB/DORA, FCA/PRA, and NYDFS. This is where Elastio stands apart. Elastio delivers agentless, enterprise-wide provable recovery by continuously validating backups and cloud storage to ensure ransomware-free recoverability within defined SLAs. It acts as a provable control, not just another detection layer—providing the evidence CISOs and boards need to quantify ransomware risk and recovery readiness. Case in Point: Jaguar Land Rover The Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) attack in 2025 illustrates what happens when malware scans are mistaken for proof of safety.The HellCat Ransomware Group used stolen JIRA credentials to infiltrate their network. Though malware scans passed, unvalidated backups delayed restoration for weeks, costing the company an estimated £1.5 billion in downtime and disruption. With Elastio’s Provable Recovery, JLR could have identified backup corruption early, isolated infected data, and restored from a verifiably clean point—closing the weeks-long recovery gap and mitigating both business and reputational impact. From Prevention to Proof The takeaway is clear: Malware scanners detect some threats.Elastio proves recovery. Modern resilience requires both—but proof is the missing control. Boards, regulators, and insurers no longer accept “we think we can recover.” They demand provable recovery assurance with continuous validation and measurable recovery integrity scores. Final Thought Prevention can fail. Proof cannot.Elastio gives organizations the evidence that recovery is not just possible—it’s provable. Prove it once. Validate it continuously. Trust it always.Visit elastio.com/platform to learn how provable recovery builds real resilience and board-level confidence