A potent combination of vulnerabilities in cloud frameworks and the potential for threat actors to use readily available artificial intelligence tools to breach systems is raising awareness among enterprise IT organizations in data protection and cyber resiliency.

“Everyone is afraid that people are going to use generative AI to automate existing attacks,” said Brent Ellis (pictured, right), senior analyst at Forrester Research Inc. “Automation of existing attacks is a big problem, and it’s one of the reasons why a lot of data protection companies are really focusing on cyberthreats right now. Cloud specifically just opens you up to a greater threat landscape, so there’s a lot more ways to get in. You’re in this world where you have to defend your data at the level of data.”

Ellis spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante at the Cyber Resiliency Summit, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. He was joined by Elizabeth Preston (left), senior consultant at Forrester Research, and they discussed key strategies for protection and resilience and the results of a recent study on IT customer preparedness. (* Disclosure below.)

Avoiding backup corruption

Defense at the level of data means a focus on tools for prevention and recovery, according to Ellis. This involves not only ensuring there is a practical recovery capability in place, but also a way to guard against corruption of the backup system itself.

“Ultimately, you need a recovery strategy, you need a way to put everything back in place once you’ve been compromised,” Ellis said. “There’s been plenty of examples where companies have gone and restored information from backup, they restore the threat to their production environment and they’re just attacked again. There’s been examples of people basically owning your backup system and then they turn off your backup jobs and initiate an attack.”

While AI and machine learning could become significant weapons in the hands of hackers, the technologies are already in use to spot anomalous behavior and provide crucial information, according to Ellis.

“The AI/ML world has been a huge boon for improving the capabilities of backup systems to find indicators of compromise … finding a malware signature, finding a ransomware signature, looking at behavior analysis,” he said. “I saw my first example of generative AI integrated to a backup system earlier this year. This is still a fast-evolving place.”

That evolution is having an impact on planning and resilience among many firms. In a “Total Economic Impact study” commissioned by Dell Technologies Inc., the customers surveyed expressed concern around preparedness for recovery in the event of a successful cyberattack.

“When we interviewed customers, the types of challenges they shared with us were that while they may have had backup and recovery solutions in place, they were disjointed, they weren’t covering everything and there was a lot of effort and money involved in maintaining them,” said Preston, who presented the study’s findings during the interview. “If they did experience a ransomware attack or another reason to recover data, it was a very slow and painful process.”

Results from the study also showed that Dell’s PowerProtect CyberRecovery with CyberSense played a role in business continuity following a cyberattack.

“For the composite organization, based on the interview data that we collected, we showed an 80% reduction in hours spent on recovery,” Preston said. “It took a lot less time and effort to recover from a ransomware attack. We also saw a 75% reduction in downtime.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Cyber Resiliency Summit:

(* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the “Cyber Resiliency Summit.” Neither Dell Technologies Inc., the sponsor of theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE