Backups Are Becoming the New Point of Failure
A recent CIO article highlights a growing trend: attackers see backup systems as one of the most effective pressure points in ransomware campaigns. The data points referenced — including attackers targeting backups in 94% of incidents and median losses reaching $3M when backups are compromised — illustrate how the recovery process has become a primary vulnerability.Attackers Start With the Backups
Ransomware rarely activates immediately. After initial access, ransomware attackers lurk, quietly damaging critical data and planting the seeds of persistence which will allow them to re-emerge and attack again after incident response and data recovery. During this period, automated backup workflows continue as usual — capturing corrupted files and replicating them into storage.With every backup cycle, more malicious data becomes embedded across restore points. When defenders eventually notice the intrusion, the backups they planned to rely on may already contain hidden, persistent corruption.The article notes that energy, education, and government sectors are especially exposed because backup and production environments often share data pathways and access controls.This strategy of low-and-slow infiltration of backups is a known tactic, often associated with advanced persistent threats (APTs) and sophisticated ransomware gangs like Ryuk, Conti, and BlackCat/ALPHV, who focus on "big game hunting".Two examples:- Ascension Healthcare System (2024): A Black Basta ransomware attack severely disrupted this major U.S. health system. The attack compromised access to electronic health records and essential operational systems, forcing manual operations and ambulance diversions. The sheer scale of the disruption and reported $1.3 billion in losses suggest a significant failure of standard recovery mechanisms, including backups (The HIPAA Journal reported that “It took Ascension around 6 weeks to restore access to its electronic medical record system and resume normal operations”).
- CDK Global (2024): An attack on this automotive software provider caused widespread outages at over 15,000 U.S. and Canadian auto dealerships. A second attack occurred while the company was actively trying to recover its systems, highlighting the attackers' intent to prevent successful restoration from existing measures.
The Cost of a Poisoned Backup
According to the article:- Breach impact averages $375K when backups are clean
- Impact rises to $3M on average when backups are compromised
- Ransom demands and ransom payments nearly double when backup data is corrupted
The takeaway: when the fallback is gone, every option becomes more expensive.The Core Weakness: Backups Don’t Verify The Integrity Of What They Store
Most backup tools operate at the surface level. They depend on:- file names
- traditional signatures
- known malware patterns
These methods cannot detect latent corruption. Once a malicious file enters the backup system, it often stays there undetected, waiting to be restored.This creates a dangerous scenario: teams may reintroduce the threat at the moment they’re trying to recover.The Required Shift: Validate the Data Itself
The article points toward a growing need for content-level validation.Rather than assuming data is good because it is stored by a trusted backup utility, defenders need to determine:- When did corruption begin?
- Which restore points remain safe?
- What data can be treated as known-good?
This shift moves recovery from guesswork to verification.Where RPO-Zero Fits: Recovery Must Start From Clean, Current Data
Traditional recovery strategies rely on acceptable data loss — expressed through the recovery point objective (RPO). An RPO of minutes or hours assumed that losing some data was tolerable as long as the system could be restored.That assumption breaks down in ransomware events.Corrupted backups mean that any RPO greater than zero has a built-in risk: the “acceptable loss window” may include already-infected data.Mimic’s RPO-Zero philosophy is direct:- No data loss is acceptable.
- No corruption is acceptable.
- No restore point can be used until it is verified as known-good.
RPO-Zero is not about storing more backups. It is about ensuring that the next piece of data restored, no matter when it was created, is validated as clean.RPO-Zero transforms recovery from “restore the most recent point” to “restore the most recent verified-good point.” This is the only safe model when attackers target backups proactively.Mimic’s Known-Good Approach
At Mimic, we design for assumed breach. We do not rely on the idea that stored data is safe. We verify it.Our known-good approach focuses on:- Monitoring changes to the content of critical files and the behavior of processes and agentic AI systems that access those files, with guardrails enforcing defense against AI hallucinations and data poisoning attacks.
- Version-over-version comparison to identify when corruption starts
- Isolation of clean restore points so recovery begins from validated data
- Recovery workflows driven by known-good artifacts, not assumptions
- This ensures the data put back into production has been validated at the content level, not just trusted because it was stored by a known backup utility.
Recovery only works when the restored data is known-good. Known-good only exists when data is monitored for corruption.The Future of Ransomware Resilience
Backup systems are no longer passive repositories. They are an active element of the attack chain. Organizations need a recovery strategy built on verification, not assumptions or trust.Mimic’s known-good solution gives teams confidence at the moment they need it most: when the recovery button is pressed. 
