Defeating stealth ransomware with Deep File Inspection
How Elastio identified the last clean recovery point and restored a SaaS company in hours after fileless ransomware defeated endpoint defenses.
For a SaaS company, long-term downtime is the kiss of death. If you can't meet your SLAs, it can be an extinction-level event.
- Industry
- SaaS
- Partners
- JetSweep, AWS
- Environment
- AWS Backup, Data Recovery
Fileless ransomware bypassed every defense
On a Saturday morning, JetSweep received an urgent call from AWS. A SaaS company had been hit by ransomware. Operations were down.
The breach originated from an unpatched firewall. JetSweep secured the entry point quickly. But the deeper problem was recovery: the attackers had deployed fileless ransomware, encrypting data over time while hiding the decryption key in memory.
Operations appeared normal during the attack. Even with endpoint protection in place, the attack went undetected. Worse, the corrupted data had already been copied into backups. The company had no reliable recovery path.
Clean backup identified in hours, not weeks
JetSweep deployed Elastio. The Hunt Engine performed Deep File Inspection across every backup, identifying:
- Which backups contained ransomware artifacts
- When the infection began
- The last provably clean recovery point
The company restored operations within hours, avoiding weeks of manual trial-and-error verification.
Elastio allowed us to see almost immediately which backups were clean. That saved us days, possibly weeks, of trial and error.
The case for continuous verification
Elastio is designed to run continuously, verifying data integrity before an attack so organizations always have a provable clean recovery point ready. In this case, Elastio was deployed after the attack to accelerate recovery.
That is not the ideal scenario. Had Elastio been running before the incident, the company would have avoided 11 days of data loss and had an immediate recovery path.
- Hours, not weeks
- Clean backup identified within hours, eliminating weeks of manual effort
- 10-day RPO
- Most recent clean backup was 10 days old. Without Elastio, recovery may not have been possible.
- Zero reinfection
- Agentless Deep File Inspection ensured compromised backups were never restored
- Continuous protection
- Company adopted ongoing Deep File Inspection to prevent recurrence
Details have been anonymized to protect the privacy and security of the organization. Core facts and recovery strategies remain unchanged.