Ransomware Isn’t a Malware Problem Anymore - It’s a Data Integrity Problem

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 their 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 ransomware
• Insider Threat Detection: Unauthorised or suspicious encryption by insiders
• Corruption Detection: Detect any corruption in backups
• Malware 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.