Achieve Total Visibility and Control Over Your Data—Because Knowing Is the First Step to Security.

In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, data security has never been more critical. Many organizations struggle to maintain visibility over where their data resides—whether it’s at rest or in motion. A recent Gartner study revealed that over 50% of executives admit to having incomplete visibility into their data environment (Forrester). Similarly, Forrester found that 43% of companies do not fully understand how their critical data moves through systems or where it’s stored, creating significant vulnerabilities.

In the face of sophisticated threats like ransomware and wiper attacks, ensuring real-time data visibility and security is not just important; it’s essential. Without comprehensive insight, organizations remain vulnerable to disruptions, financial losses, and operational failures.

The Challenge: Achieving 100% Real-Time Data Visibility

To achieve full security, organizations need 100% visibility into their data, 24/7, in real time. This means knowing exactly where every byte of your critical data is stored and how it’s being accessed. Real-time insights allow organizations to detect anomalies, respond quickly to threats, and ensure business continuity by addressing potential breaches before they cause significant damage.

Solutions for Comprehensive Data Visibility

Platforms like Actifile and NeuShield provide real-time visibility, ensuring that organizations know exactly where their sensitive data resides at all times. Actifile offers continuous scanning for sensitive data—both at rest and in motion—across the entire network, while NeuShield focuses on ensuring rapid recovery from ransomware attacks by enabling data restoration without the need to rebuild entire systems (CyBrilliance Forensics, Veeam Software).

Use Cases for Knowing Where Your Data Is in Real-Time

1. Ransomware Attacks During a ransomware attack, attackers encrypt files, making them inaccessible to users. With real-time visibility, an organization can quickly detect encryption attempts, isolate affected systems, and prevent further spread. NeuShield plays a crucial role here by enabling forensic teams to identify the targeted files and restore them without relying on traditional backups. Actifile, on the other hand, helps isolate sensitive data during an attack, ensuring it remains secure even as the breach unfolds.

2. Data Exfiltration In cases of data theft or unauthorized transfers, real-time monitoring ensures organizations are alerted when data is leaving the environment unexpectedly. Forensic teams can then use this data to track how, when, and by whom the information was accessed. Actifile provides granular insights into which sensitive files are at risk, while NeuShield prevents attackers from tampering with critical data during the breach.

3. Operational Disruptions Should a cyberattack compromise critical systems like Active Directories, DNS, or cloud backups, knowing the state of your data in real time allows for immediate triage. Without this visibility, organizations could be left flying blind during an attack, delaying recovery efforts. NeuShield ensures critical data can be recovered rapidly, while Actifile provides full visibility into sensitive data, mitigating risks and reducing the overall attack surface.

NeuShield’s Value to Incident Response and Forensic Objectives

Wiper and Boot Sector Protection Wiper malware aims to destroy critical data, often making it unrecoverable. NeuShield’s Wiper Protection ensures that data remains intact by monitoring all disk access and preventing malicious programs from wiping system drives. This functionality is essential for forensics, as it preserves evidence of the attack, allowing investigators to understand the full scope of the incident. The Boot Sector Protection ensures systems can be restored even when ransomware or wiper malware targets the boot sector, which is crucial for maintaining operational continuity.

Disk Protection and One-Click Restore NeuShield’s Disk Protection prevents malware and ransomware from corrupting hard drives, while the One-Click Restore feature enables entire operating systems to be restored to a known good state, significantly reducing downtime. This ensures that forensic teams have a stable environment from which to conduct their analysis, without the need to rebuild compromised systems. Actifile complements this with its ability to track sensitive data during and after an attack, ensuring no valuable information is lost or compromised.

Cloud Drive Protection For organizations relying on cloud storage solutions like OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, or Box, NeuShield’s Cloud Drive Protection ensures that ransomware does not spread to cloud environments, and that any corrupted data can be quickly restored. Real-time visibility into cloud data is critical during an attack, as ransomware infections in cloud environments can significantly increase the scope of the damage.

Mirror Shielding? and Data Engrams? NeuShield’s Mirror Shielding? technology ensures that data can be instantly recovered from any kind of corruption, deletion, or encryption without the need for traditional backups. For forensic teams, this feature allows them to examine the pre-attack state of the data, crucial for investigating the root cause of an incident. Data Engrams? provide a history of file modifications, offering forensic investigators critical insights into the timeline of an attack.

Actifile’s Impact on Incident Response and Forensic Objectives

Sensitive Data Protection and Monitoring Actifile enables organizations to monitor sensitive data in real-time, ensuring that PII and other critical data are protected from unauthorized access during an attack. By continuously scanning for sensitive files across the network, Actifile provides full visibility into which assets are at risk, making it easier for incident response teams to prioritize and isolate compromised systems. This capability helps organizations remain compliant with data protection regulations during and after a cyber incident.

Granular Data Access Controls During a breach, Actifile allows organizations to apply granular access controls, limiting exposure to sensitive data. This ensures that even in cases where the breach compromises other aspects of the infrastructure, the most critical data remains protected. Incident response teams can then focus on remediation efforts, confident that sensitive data is secure.

What Happens Without NeuShield and Actifile?

Without these solutions, organizations face a range of challenges in responding to cyber incidents:

• Extended Downtime: Recovery from ransomware or wiper attacks would take much longer without NeuShield’s rapid restore capabilities.
• Data Loss: Without Disk Protection and Boot Sector Protection, key systems could be permanently compromised, making recovery difficult or impossible.
• Slower Incident Response: IR and forensic teams would need to spend valuable time restoring systems before investigating the root cause of the attack. Actifile and NeuShield streamline this process by providing real-time monitoring and rapid recovery tools.
• Increased Spread of Ransomware: Without Cloud Drive Protection, ransomware can spread across cloud environments, significantly increasing the scope of the attack.

Conclusion

In today’s evolving digital landscape, real-time visibility into data at rest and in motion is crucial for ensuring Operational Resilience and minimizing damage during a cyber incident. NeuShield and Actifile provide advanced solutions for protecting critical data, enabling rapid recovery, and supporting forensic investigations. Their combined capabilities offer businesses the tools needed to secure data, respond quickly to incidents, and recover seamlessly. For organizations striving to protect their most valuable assets, real-time visibility and rapid recovery solutions like NeuShield and Actifile are essential components of a robust cybersecurity strategy.

Contact CyBrilliance today to discover how NeuShield and Actifile can transform your organization’s resilience, providing unparalleled protection and rapid recovery solutions against the most sophisticated cyber threats. By implementing these cutting-edge platforms, you ensure that your critical data remains secure, while minimizing downtime and safeguarding your business continuity.

This article has been authored by Gordon Cowan, CEO of CyBrilliance Inc., a global leader in data security and operational resilience.

Disclaimer: The information provided in this article reflects industry best practices and the most up-to-date technological advancements at the time of publication. However, cybersecurity landscapes continually evolve, and organizations are advised to regularly review and update their strategies to maintain compliance and effectiveness against emerging threats.