NIST guide to help orgs recover from ransomware, other data integrity attacks
The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has published a cybersecurity practice guide enterprises can use to recover from data integrity attacks, i.e., destructive malware and ransomware attacks, malicious insider activity or simply mistakes by employees that have resulted in the modification or destruction of company data (emails, employee records, financial records, and customer data).
About the guide
Ransomware is currently one of the most disruptive scourges affecting enterprises. While it would be ideal to detect the early warning signs of a ransomware attack to minimize its effects or prevent it altogether, there are still too many successful incursions that organizations must recover from.
Special Publication (SP) 1800-11, Data Integrity: Recovering from Ransomware and Other Destructive Events can help organizations to develop a strategy for recovering from an attack affecting data integrity (and to be able to trust that any recovered data is accurate, complete, and free of malware), recover from such an event while maintaining operations, and manage enterprise risk.
The goal is to monitor and detect data corruption in widely used as well as custom applications, and to identify what data way altered/corrupted, when, by whom, the impact of the action, whether other events happened at the same time. Finally, organizations are advised on how to restore data to its last known good configuration and to identify the correct backup version.
“Multiple systems need to work together to prevent, detect, notify, and recover from events that corrupt data. This project explores methods to effectively recover operating systems, databases, user files, applications, and software/system configurations. It also explores issues of auditing and reporting (user activity monitoring, file system monitoring, database monitoring, and rapid recovery solutions) to support recovery and investigations,” the authors added.
The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) at NIST used specific commercially available and open-source components when creating a solution to address this cybersecurity challenge, but noted that each organization’s IT security experts should choose products that will best work for them by taking into consideration how they will integrate with the IT system infrastructure and tools already in use.
The NCCoE tested the set up against several test cases (ransomware attack, malware attack, user modifies a configuration file, administrator modifies a user’s file, database or database schema has been altered in error by an administrator or script). Additional materials can be found here.