Data Integrity: Recovering from Ransomware and Other Destructive Events

Businesses face a near-constant threat of destructive malware, ransomware, malicious insider activities, and even honest mistakes that can alter or destroy critical data. These data corruption events could cause a significant loss to a company’s reputation, business operations, and bottom line.

These types of adverse events, that ultimately impact data integrity, can compromise critical corporate information including emails, employee records, financial records, and customer data. It is imperative for organizations to recover quickly from a data integrity attack and trust the accuracy and precision of the recovered data.

The National Cybersecurity Center of Excellence (NCCoE) at NIST built a laboratory environment to explore methods to effectively recover from a data corruption event in various Information Technology (IT) enterprise environments. NCCoE also implemented auditing and reporting IT system use to support incident recovery and investigations.

This NIST Cybersecurity Practice Guide demonstrates how organizations can implement technologies to take immediate action following a data corruption event. The example solution outlined in this guide encourages effective monitoring and detection of data corruption in standard, enterprise components as well as custom applications and data composed of open-source and commercially available components.