Unlocking the Power of Cloud Transformation with AWS and Elastio

Cloud ransomware incidents rarely begin with visible disruption. More often, they unfold quietly, long before an alert is triggered or a system fails. By the time incident response teams are engaged, organizations have usually already taken decisive action. Workloads are isolated. Instances are terminated. Cloud dashboards show unusual activity. Executives, legal counsel, and communications teams are already involved. And very quickly, one question dominates every discussion. What can we restore that we actually trust? That question exposes a critical gap in many cloud-native resilience strategies. Most organizations have backups. Many have immutable storage, cross-region replication, and locked vaults. These controls are aligned with cloud provider best practices and availability frameworks. Yet during ransomware recovery, those same organizations often cannot confidently determine which recovery point is clean. Cloud doesn’t remove ransomware risk — it relocates it This is not a failure of effort. It is a consequence of how cloud architectures shift risk. Cloud-native environments have dramatically improved the security posture of compute. Infrastructure is ephemeral. Servers are no longer repaired; they are replaced. Containers and instances are designed to be disposable. From a defensive standpoint, this reduces persistence at the infrastructure layer and limits traditional malware dwell time. However, cloud migration does not remove ransomware risk. It relocates it. Persistent storage remains long-lived, highly automated, and deeply trusted. Object stores, block snapshots, backups, and replicas are designed to survive everything else. Modern ransomware campaigns increasingly target this persistence layer, not the compute that accesses it. Attackers don’t need malware — they need credentials Industry investigations consistently support this pattern. Mandiant, Verizon DBIR, and other threat intelligence sources report that credential compromise and identity abuse are now among the most common initial access vectors in cloud incidents. Once attackers obtain valid credentials, they can operate entirely through native cloud APIs, often without deploying custom malware or triggering endpoint-based detections. From an operational standpoint, these actions appear legitimate. Data is written, versions are created, snapshots are taken, and replication occurs as designed. The cloud platform faithfully records and preserves state, regardless of whether that state is healthy or compromised. This is where many organizations encounter an uncomfortable reality during incident response. Immutability is not integrity Immutability ensures that data cannot be deleted or altered after it is written. It does not validate whether the data was already encrypted, corrupted, or poisoned at the time it was captured. Cloud-native durability and availability controls were never designed to answer the question incident responders care about most: whether stored data can be trusted for recovery. In ransomware cases, incident response teams repeatedly observe the same failure mode. Attackers encrypt or corrupt production data, often gradually, using authorized access. Automated backup systems snapshot that corrupted state. Replication propagates it to secondary regions. Vault locks seal it permanently. The organization has not lost its backups. It has preserved the compromised data exactly as designed. Backup isolation alone is not enough This dynamic is particularly dangerous in cloud environments because it can occur without malware, without infrastructure compromise, and without violating immutability controls. CISA and NIST have both explicitly warned that backup isolation and retention alone are insufficient if integrity is not verified. Availability testing does not guarantee recoverability. Replication can accelerate the blast radius Replication further amplifies the impact. Cross-region architectures prioritize recovery point objectives and automation speed. When data changes in a primary region, those changes are immediately propagated to disaster recovery environments. If the change is ransomware-induced corruption, replication accelerates the blast radius rather than containing it. From the incident response perspective, this creates a critical bottleneck that is often misunderstood. The hardest part of recovery is deciding what to restore The hardest part of recovery is not rebuilding infrastructure. Cloud platforms make redeployment fast and repeatable. Entire environments can be recreated in hours. The hardest part is deciding what to restore. Without integrity validation, teams are forced into manual forensic processes under extreme pressure. Snapshots are mounted one by one. Logs are reviewed. Timelines are debated. Restore attempts become experiments. Every decision carries risk, and every delay compounds business impact. This is why ransomware recovery frequently takes days or weeks even when backups exist. Boards don’t ask “Do we have backups?” Boards do not ask whether backups are available. They ask which recovery point is the last known clean state. Without objective integrity assurance, that question cannot be answered deterministically. This uncertainty is not incidental. It is central to how modern ransomware creates leverage. Attackers understand that corrupting trust in recovery systems can be as effective as destroying systems outright. What incident response teams wish you had is certainty What incident response teams consistently wish organizations had before an incident is not more backups, but more certainty. The ability to prove, not assume, that recovery data is clean. Evidence that restoration decisions are based on validated integrity rather than best guesses made under pressure. Integrity assurance is the missing control This is where integrity assurance becomes the missing control in many cloud strategies. NIST CSF explicitly calls for verification of backup integrity as part of the Recover function. Yet most cloud-native architectures stop at durability and immutability. When integrity validation is in place, recovery changes fundamentally. Organizations can identify the last known clean recovery point ahead of time. Recovery decisions become faster, safer, and defensible. Executive and regulatory confidence improves because actions are supported by evidence. From an incident response standpoint, the difference is stark. One scenario is prolonged uncertainty and escalating risk. The other is controlled, confident recovery. Resilience is proving trust, not storing data Cloud-native architecture is powerful, but ransomware has adapted to it. In today’s threat landscape, resilience is no longer defined by whether data exists somewhere in the cloud. It is defined by whether an organization can prove that the data it restores is trustworthy. That is what incident response teams see after cloud ransomware. Not missing backups, but missing certainty. Certainty is the foundation of recovery And in modern cloud environments, certainty is the foundation of recovery.

Closing the Data Integrity Control Gap In 2025, the cybersecurity narrative shifted from protection to provable resilience. The reason? A staggering 333% surge in "Hunter-Killer" malware threats designed not just to evade your security stack, but to systematically dismantle it. For CISOs and CTOs in regulated industries, this isn't just a technical hurdle; it is a Material Risk that traditional recovery frameworks are failing to address. The Hunter-Killer Era: Blinding the Frontline The Picus Red Report 2024 identified that one out of every four malware samples now includes "Hunter-Killer" functionality. These tools, like EDRKillShifter, target the kernel-level "callbacks" that EDR and Antivirus rely on to monitor your environment. The Result: Your dashboard shows a "Green" status, while the adversary is silently corrupting your production data. This creates a Recovery Blind Spot that traditional, agent-based controls cannot see. The Material Impact: Unquantifiable Downtime When your primary defense is blinded, the "dwell time", the period an attacker sits in your network, balloons to a median of 11–26 days. In a regulated environment, this dwell time is a liability engine: The Poisoned Backup: Ransomware dwells long enough to be replicated into your "immutable" vaults.The Forensic Gridlock: Organizations spend an average of 24 days in downtime manually hunting for a "clean" recovery point.The Disclosure Clock: Under current SEC mandates, you have four days to determine the materiality of an incident. If you can’t prove your data integrity, you can’t accurately disclose your risk. Agentless Sovereignty: The Missing Control Elastio addresses the Data Integrity Gap by sitting outside the line of fire. By moving the validation layer from the compromised OS to the storage layer, we provide the only independent source of truth. The Control GapThe Elastio OutcomeAgent FragilityAgentless Sovereignty: Sitting out-of-band, Elastio is invisible to kernel-level "Hunter-Killer" malware.Trust BlindnessIndependent Truth: We validate data integrity directly from storage, ensuring recovery points are clean before you restore.Forensic LagMean Time to Clean Recovery (MTCR): Pinpoint the exact second of integrity loss to slash downtime from weeks to minutes. References & Sources GuidePoint Security GRIT 2026 Report: 58% year-over-year increase in ransomware victims.Picus Security Red Report 2024: 333% surge in Hunter-Killer malware targeting defensive systems.ESET Research - EDRKillShifter Analysis: Technical deep-dive into RansomHub’s custom EDR killer and BYOVD tactics.Mandiant M-Trends 2025: Median dwell time increases to 11 days; 57% of breaches notified by external sources.Pure Storage/Halcyon/RansomwareHelp: Average ransomware downtime recorded at 24 days across multiple industries in 2025.Cybereason True Cost to Business: 80% of organizations who pay a ransom are hit a second time.

Cloud-Native Architectures Shift Ransomware Risk to Data Integrity While cloud platforms improve availability and durability through replication, immutability, and automated recovery, they do not ensure data integrity. In cloud-native environments, compute is ephemeral and identity-driven, but persistent storage is long-lived and highly automated. This shifts ransomware risk away from servers and toward data itself. Modern ransomware increasingly exploits compromised cloud credentials and native APIs to encrypt or corrupt data gradually, often without triggering traditional malware detection. As a result, immutable backups and replicas can faithfully preserve corrupted data, leaving organizations unable to confidently restore clean systems. Ransomware resilience in cloud-native architectures therefore requires data integrity validation: continuous verification that backups, snapshots, and storage objects are clean, recoverable, and provably safe to restore. Without integrity assurance, recovery decisions depend on manual forensics, increasing downtime, operational risk, and regulatory exposure. Executive Strategic Assessment We have successfully re-architected our enterprise for the cloud, adopting a model where compute is ephemeral and infrastructure is code. In this environment, we no longer repair compromised servers; we terminate them. This success has created a dangerous blind spot. By making compute disposable, we have migrated our risk entirely to the persistent storage layer (S3, EBS, FSx, RDS). Our current architectural controls—S3 Versioning, Cross-Region Replication, and Backup Vault Locks—are designed for Durability and Availability. They guarantee that data exists and cannot be deleted. They do not guarantee that the data is clean. In cloud-native security, data integrity means the ability to cryptographically and behaviorally verify that stored data has not been silently encrypted, corrupted, or altered before it is used for recovery. In a modern ransomware attack, the threat is rarely that you "lose" your backups; it is that your automated, immutable systems perfectly preserve the corrupted state. If we replicate an encrypted database to a compliance-mode vault, we have not preserved the business—we have simply "vaulted the virus."Under the shared responsibility model, cloud providers protect the availability of the platform, while customers retain responsibility for ensuring the correctness and integrity of the data they store and recover. This brief analyzes the Integrity Gap in cloud-native resilience. It details the architectural controls required to transition from assuming a clean recovery to algorithmically proving it, ensuring that when the Board asks, The New Risk Reality: Ephemeral Compute, Permanent Risk Our migration to cloud-native architectures on AWS has fundamentally shifted our risk profile. We have moved from "repairing servers" to "replacing them." Compute is now disposable (containers, serverless functions, auto-scaling groups) and identity is dynamic (short-lived IAM credentials). This is a security win for the compute layer because the "crime scene" effectively evaporates during an incident. Cloud changes where risk concentrates, not whether risk exists. Recent incident analysis shows stolen credentials as a leading initial access vector, with median attacker dwell time measured in days rather than months. This compression of time is what enables low-and-slow data corruption to outrun human-driven validation. Multiple industry investigations support this pattern, including Mandiant and Verizon DBIR reporting that credential abuse and identity compromise are now among the most common initial access vectors in cloud environments, with attackers often persisting long enough to corrupt data before detection. However, this architecture forces a massive migration of risk into the persistent storage layer. Modern ransomware attacks exploit this shift by targeting the integrity of the state itself. Attackers encrypt object stores, poison transaction logs, or utilize automation roles to mass-modify snapshots.Why aren’t cloud-native architectures inherently ransomware-safe? Because cloud controls prioritize availability and automation, not verification of data correctness at restore time. The Strategic Blind Spot: Immutability is Not Integrity Our current resilience strategy aligns with AWS Well-Architected frameworks. We rely heavily on Availability and Durability. We use S3 Versioning, AWS Backup Vault Locks, and Cross-Region Replication. These controls are excellent at ensuring data exists and cannot be deleted. However, they fail to ensure the data is clean. Integrity controls verify recoverability and correctness of restoration assets, not just retention. Operationally, this means validating data for encryption or corruption, proving restore usability, and recording a deterministic “last known clean” recovery point so restoration decisions do not depend on manual forensics. In a "Low and Slow" corruption attack, a threat actor uses valid, compromised credentials to overwrite data or generate new encrypted versions over weeks. In cloud environments, attackers increasingly encrypt or replace data using native storage APIs rather than custom malware. Once access is obtained, legitimate encryption and snapshot mechanisms can be abused to corrupt data while appearing operationally normal.This creates a failure mode unique to cloud-native architectures: attacks can succeed without malware, without infrastructure compromise, and without violating immutability controls. The "Immutable Poison" Problem: If an attacker encrypts a production database, Backups will dutifully snapshot that corruption. If Vault Lock is enabled, we effectively seal the corrupted state in a compliance-mode vault. We have preserved the attack rather than the business. Vault Locking prevents deletion and lifecycle modification of recovery points, including by privileged users. It does not validate the integrity or cleanliness of the data being ingested and retained.Replication Accelerates Blast Radius: Because replication is designed for speed (RPO), it immediately propagates the corrupted state to the DR region. The Missing Control: Recovery Assurance During a ransomware event, the most expensive resource is decision time. The Board will not ask "Do we have backups?" They will ask "Which recovery point is the last known good state?" Without a dedicated integrity control, answering this requires manual forensics. Teams must mount snapshots one by one, scan logs, and attempt trial-and-error restores. This process turns a 4-hour RTO into a multi-day forensic ordeal. Industry data shows that organizations take months to fully identify and contain breaches, and multi-environment incidents extend that timeline further. This gap is why recovery cannot depend on snapshot-by-snapshot investigation during an active crisis. Critically, integrity validation produces durable evidence, timestamps, scan results, and clean-point attestations that can be reviewed by executives, auditors, and regulators as part of post-incident assurance. Where Elastio Fits: The Integrity Assurance Layer Elastio fits into our architecture not as a backup tool, but as an Integrity Assurance Control (NIST CSF "Recover") that audits the quality of our persistence layer. Detection in Depth: Unlike EDR which monitors processes, Elastio watches the entropy and structure of the data itself. It scans S3 buckets and EBS snapshots for the mathematical signatures of encryption and corruption.Provable Recovery: Elastio indexes recovery points to algorithmically identify the "Last Known Clean" timestamp. This allows us to automate the selection of a clean restore point and decouple recovery time from forensic complexity. Platform Engineering Guide Architecture Context Elastio operates as an agentless sidecar. It utilizes scale-out worker fleets to mount and inspect storage via standard Cloud APIs (EBS Direct APIs, S3 GetObject, Azure APIs). It does not require modifying production workloads or installing agents on production nodes. Protection Capabilities by Asset Class 1. AWS S3 & Azure Blob Data Lakes Real-Time Inspection: The system scans objects in real-time as they are created. This ensures immediate detection of "infection by addition."Threat Hunting: If threats are found, automated threat hunts are performed on the existing objects/versions to identify the extent of the compromise.Recovery: The system identifies the last known clean version, allowing restores to be automated and precise. 2. Block Storage (EBS, EC2, Azure Disks, Azure VMs) Scale-Out Scanning: Automated scans of persistent storage are performed using ephemeral, scale-out clusters. This ensures that inspection does not impact the performance of the production workload.Policy Control: For long-lived workloads (e.g., self-hosted databases), policies control how frequently to scan (e.g., daily, hourly, or on snapshot creation) to balance assurance with cost. Integrity validation frequency must be faster than plausible time-to-impact. With ransomware dwell time measured in days, weekly validation leaves material integrity gaps. For critical, high-risk workloads, production data validation can be configured to run as frequently as hourly, based on policy and business criticality, while lower-risk assets can operate at longer intervals to balance assurance, cost, and operational impact. 3. AWS Backup Scan-on-Create: Automated scanning of backups occurs immediately as they are created.Asset Support: Supports EC2, EBS, AMI, EFS, FSx, and S3 backup types.Vault Integration: Fully integrated with AWS Backup Restore Testing and Logically Air-Gapped (LAG) Vaults, ensuring that data moving into high-security vaults is verified clean before locking. 4. Azure Backup Scan-on-Create: Automated scanning of backups occurs immediately as they are created.Asset Support: Supports Azure VM, Azure Managed Disks, and Azure Blobs. 5. Managed Databases (RDS / Azure Managed SQL) Status: Not Supported.Note: Direct integrity scanning inside managed database PaaS services is not currently supported. Table 1: Threat Manifestation & Control Fit Architecture ComponentThe "Native" Failure ModeProtection Available (Elastio)AWS S3 / Azure Blob"Infection by Addition"Ransomware writes new encrypted versions of objects. The bucket grows, and "current" versions are unusable.Real-Time Detection & HuntingScans real-time as objects are created. Automates threat hunts for last known clean versions. Automates restores.EC2 / Azure VMs(Self-Hosted DBs)The "Live Database" AttackAttackers encrypt database files (.mdf, .dbf) while the OS remains up. Standard snapshots capture the encrypted state.Automated Integrity ScansAutomated scans of persistent storage in scale-out clusters. Policies control scan frequency for long-lived workloads.AWS BackupVault PoisoningWe lock a backup that was already compromised (Time-to-detect > Backup Frequency).Scan-on-Create (Vault Gate)Automated scanning of backups (EC2, EBS, AMI, EFS, FSx, S3) as they are created. Integrated with AWS Restore Test and LAG Vaults.Azure BackupReplica CorruptionBackup vaults replicate corrupted recovery points to paired regions.Scan-on-CreateAutomated scanning of Azure VM, Managed Disk, and Blob backups as they are created.Managed DBs(RDS / Azure Managed SQL)Logical CorruptionValid SQL commands drop tables or scramble columns.Not SupportedIn these environments, integrity assurance must be addressed through complementary controls such as transaction log analysis, application-layer validation, and point-in-time recovery testing. Conclusion Adopting this control moves us from a posture of "We assume our immutable backups are valid" to "We have algorithmic proof of which recovery points are clean." In an era of compromised identities, this verification is the requisite check-and-balance for cloud storage. This control removes uncertainty from recovery decisions when time, trust, and data integrity matter most.In cloud-native environments, ransomware resilience is no longer defined by whether data exists, but by whether its integrity can be continuously proven before recovery.In practical terms, any cloud-native ransomware recovery strategy that cannot deterministically identify a last known clean recovery point before restoration should be considered operationally incomplete. This perspective reflects patterns we consistently see in enterprise incident response, including insights shared by Elastio advisors with deep experience leading ransomware investigations and cloud recovery efforts.