Case Study
Building Cyber Resilience in a World of Destructive Cyberattacks
This strategic whitepaper introduces the Cohesity Destructive Cyberattack Resilience Maturity Model, providing a roadmap for organizations to move beyond traditional cybersecurity toward true cyber resilience. It explores the five critical barriers to recovery and explains how to integrate IT and Security operations to survive modern "wiper" and ransomware attacks.
- Topic
- Security
- Published
- 16 Jan 2026
Data is the essential lifeblood of your organization, yet traditional disaster recovery (DR) methods are no longer sufficient to handle the era of destructive ransomware and wiper attacks. While standard DR plans focus on equipment failure or natural disasters, modern adversaries actively target backups to prevent recovery and force ransom payments.
To achieve true cyber resilience, organizations must move beyond simple prevention and integrate the response workflows of Security Operations with the recovery workflows of IT Operations. This white paper introduces the Cohesity Destructive Cyberattack Resilience Maturity Model, providing a vendor-agnostic roadmap to assess your current capabilities.
Key Highlights:
The Shift to Resilience: Moves beyond simple prevention and detection to focus on withstanding attacks through integrated response and recovery.
Traditional BC/DR Limitations: Explains why standard disaster recovery plans are unfit for cyberattacks where adversaries actively target backups.
The "Clean Room" Concept: Defines isolated environments where Security Operations can investigate attacks without risk of reinfection.
Five Barriers to Resilience: Identifies critical hurdles, including the historical disconnect between CIO (recovery) and CISO (response) teams.
Defense Evasion Insights: Highlights that "Defense Evasion" is the most prevalent tactic in the MITRE ATT&CK framework, necessitating agentless threat hunting.
The Staging Room: Details the importance of a recovery zone to satisfy interdependencies and test mitigated systems before production.
Maturity Benchmarking: Provides a 5-level maturity model (Recoverable to Optimizing) to assess and improve organizational readiness.
Rapid Response (MiVIRC): Introduces the Minimum Viable Response Capability to ensure communication and security tools are available post-attack.
AI-Powered Data Classification: Uses ML to find and protect sensitive unstructured data across the organization for regulatory compliance.