Did anyone attend RSA 2026?
Everpure exhibited and attended at RSA 2026, the biggest annual gathering of cyber security and cyber security professional and companies. Besides an booth, we presented and sponsored several activities. Let us know if you attended and share what your observed with the community. Here are key trends noted by Everpure at the RSA 2026 conference: The RSA 2026 Narrative RSA 2026 signaled a significant shift in the industry’s mindset, moving away from reactive defense toward a proactive business configuration that leverages "active" systems to sense, pivot, and self-correct. Agentic AI: We are officially in an "AI vs. AI" war. RSAC 2026 highlighted that adversaries now have the upper hand, leveraging Agentic AI to expose vulnerabilities that have remained undiscovered by humans for 10+ years. Because human-led defense cannot keep pace with machine-speed exploits, the focus has shifted from "human-in-the-loop" to "human-on-the-loop." This model relies on autonomous, self-healing systems to isolate threats and restore environments in real-time, allowing humans to act as strategic governors of AI insights rather than manual controllers of the recovery process. In addition, identity security must deal with emerging polymorphic social engineering attacks. MTTA: JPMorgan introduced Mean Time to Adapt, prioritizing real-time posture reconfiguration over static recovery (RTO) to neutralize active threats. Data Integrity: Bruce Schneier identified a "resilience gap" from silent AI corruption, making integrity checks a mandatory prerequisite for trustworthy recovery. Quantum Readiness: Resilience now requires migrating to Post-Quantum Cryptography (PQC) to shield long-lived data from "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" tactics. Defense to Disruption: "Active Defense" aims to increase attacker costs and efforts. Future Threats: Panels warned of "Harvest Now, Decrypt Later" quantum risks and polymorphic social engineering, while honoring quantum networking breakthroughs.Data Intelligence and Cyber Resilience
Over the next few months you will be hearing more about data intelligence from Everpure. What is it? How is it relevant to cyber resilience? Data intelligence is the practice of transforming raw data into actionable insights through automated discovery, classification, and metadata analysis. In the modern threat landscape, it is the essential bridge between simple "backup" and true Active Resilience. Without intelligence, resilience is blind. Data intelligence provides the "who, what, and where" of your digital estate, allowing you to: Prioritize Recovery: Identify mission-critical applications and sensitive PII to ensure the most vital services are restored first. Accelerate Detection: Use AI-driven behavioral analysis to spot "silent" corruption or unauthorized access at the storage layer. Ensure Clean Restoration: Precisely tag compromised data to prevent re-infecting environments during recovery. By unifying data security with intelligence, organizations move from being passive targets to Active Defenders, ensuring operational survivability even in the face of sophisticated agentic attacks.Why Cyber Resilience Requires Recovery Not Just Backups: CISO and Field Perspectives
15 Minutes---Webinar from Everpure's Rick Orloff, CISO, and Scott Taylor, Director of Cyber Resilience Field Solution Architects on Cyber Recovery Strategy Resilience isn't just prevention—it’s about the "Minimum Viable Business." At RSAC 2026, Everpure’s Rick Orloff and Scott Taylor explained why recovery fails without understanding dependencies. Prioritize critical data and cross-functional collaboration to minimize revenue disruption. Stop treating backup as the goal; make rapid, strategic recovery your mission. Link to Webinar
Know Thy Enemy: Threats to Cyber Resilience
April 2 | Register Now! "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” – Sun Tzu. Threat actors are the enemy to your operational resilience and ability to survive. Knowing their strategy and tactics will help you resist and recover from their malicious actions and keep critical workloads available. In this webinar, you’ll learn: Exploits and techniques your organization will face How AI is accelerating these threats Counter-measures to face the onslaught Register Now!Everpure Protect - Tools for Network Configuration
A key workflow item, especially when building Isolated Recovery Environments (IRE), Clean Rooms, test or production Disaster Recovery, or any other environment personality, is to reconfigure the network. Doing so automatically and per a plan is important to an automated, fast, and predictable workflow. We have built Everpure Protect Tools, which is a lightweight tool, registered with VMtools within a guest, that allows us to automate network configuration changes, per the individual Recovery Plan. Included in the download is a Powershell script for Windows, or a Shell script for Linux/Unix, which registered our tool with VMtools to perform the changes. The scripts can be loaded and ran manually in each guest, or distributed and executed as part of a workflow such as Microsoft MCM/SCCM. Everpure Protect Tools Once deployed, network changes on a per-VM or per-Recovery Plan basis will be automatically performed based upon the unique settings in the Recovery Plan being executed.Everything Ransomware: Ransomware Live
Check it out! Really interesting tracking of everything related to ransomware. https://www.ransomware.live/ Ransomware Live is a real-time intelligence site tracking active ransomware groups, victims, leaks, and extortion activity, helping security teams monitor threats, trends, and attacker behavior worldwide.Ransomware attacks are NOT going away
Here is why ransomware attacks are persistent and unlikely to disappear: 1. High Profitability and Low Risk for Criminals Ransomware is fundamentally a business model for organized crime, and it is overwhelmingly successful and profitable. Low Barrier to Entry: The rise of Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) means even novice criminals can purchase sophisticated malware and infrastructure. This franchise model ensures high attack volume regardless of law enforcement efforts. Guaranteed Revenue Stream: The evolution to multi-extortion (encrypting data and stealing it) ensures that victims are forced to pay—either to regain system access or to prevent catastrophic data leaks and regulatory fines. This dual leverage guarantees profit even if the victim has backups. Anonymity: The use of cryptocurrency for payments, coupled with geopolitical safe zones for many RaaS groups, keeps the risk of prosecution extremely low for the attackers. 2. Attackers Are Outpacing Traditional Defenses The tactics used by ransomware groups are specifically designed to neutralize traditional defense and recovery measures: Targeting the Supply Chain: Attackers are finding success by targeting trusted vendors and IT providers to compromise dozens of companies simultaneously, making defense exponentially harder for individual organizations. Attacking Backups: Modern ransomware campaigns specifically target accessible backups to delete them or malware-infect them, eliminating the victim’s recovery option and forcing them to pay the ransom. AI for Stealth and Speed: The adoption of AI is accelerating reconnaissance and stealth, dramatically compressing the time between network access and payload deployment. Attackers can move faster than human defenders can react. 3. Cyber Resilience is the New Standard The industry has shifted its mindset from trying to achieve absolute prevention (which is impossible) to guaranteeing resilience. This shift acknowledges the persistence of ransomware. The focus is now on ensuring organizations can: Anticipate and detect threats early (low MTTD). Withstand the attack without immediate operational collapse. Recover guaranteed clean data within minutes (low MTTR). Ransomware will not disappear until the criminal model becomes unprofitable, and current data shows that attackers are highly successful and rapidly adapting their strategies.Using Azure Backup with SQL Server on Azure VM with PSC Dedicated volume
This post details a brief test of Azure Backup for SQL databases. The objective was to evaluate Azure's native backup solution when the SQL Server database, residing on an Azure Virtual Machine, had its data files stored on a Pure Storage Cloud (PSC) Dedicated volume. As a disclaimer, many variations of this test can be done and results may vary, intention here is only to record my recent experience with the technology. The setup I set-up the following environment for the test: PSC Dedicated V20MP2R2 deployed into West Europe region Azure VM Standard D8ds v5 (8 vcpus, 32 GiB memory) running Windows Server 2019 Datacenter gen 2 MS SQL 2019 evaluation edition installed manually on the VM A connection was made between PSC Dedicated and the SQL VM, with MPIO enabled on the VM and one iSCSI session established to each controller. On the PSC Dedicated, I mounted 1TB volume to the host, which I then formatted to NTFS with 64k allocation unit size and mounted as drive F: on the Windows OS. To populate the SQL server with test databases, I made an empty testDB and downloaded 2 sample databases from MS site (AdventureWorks and AdventureWorksLT). The PSC Dedicated volume (F:) was used as the Data Directory of the SQL Server. On the Azure side, Recovery Services Vault (via Backup and Site Recovery from the Marketplace) was created and the VM running the SQL server discovered. The service installs an agent on the VM, enabling it to discover SQL databases instances. Furthermore, an NT Service\AzureWLBackupPluginSvc account used for orchestration of the backup is created on the SQL Server side. The backup For the purpose of the test, I set only a basic policy for all our databases. All three were discovered without issues (along with default ones). Assigning backup policies to databases creates backup items. These can be reviewed on the Azure Portal. Similarly for backup jobs, navigating to the Vault resources allows to review the type of operation (configuration, type of backup etc.) and status. In this case, all completed as scheduled (including an additional manual backup created separately). Another place where it is possible to review the state of the backup is Azure Business Continuity Center. The Restore Testing the restore is a crucial part of any backup, as without that, all we have is a Schrodinger's backup - it might work or it might not. In the testDB I created a small sample table. This only contains a few names as examples. I ran a manual backup of the testDB to capture its current state. Then deleted an item. Bye Bob. Confirmed Bob is gone. Afterwards, I run the restore operation, selecting the manual backup created in the previous step. The restore operation was triggered. And after successful completion, Bob was back. The restore can also be confirmed in the Azure portal. The Summary The testing recorded above indicates the Azures Backup for SQL Server running on Azure VM can be used to discover databases within the SQL instance and help with setting up protection, even if the data resides on an external storage such as Pure Storage Cloud Dedicated. As mentioned in the disclaimer in the beginning of this post however, there may be scenarios that could show different results, so always run tests before committing any decision to production environments.MFA Downgrade Attacks: Good to know.
Short article on MFA downgrade attacks; provides the basics on what it is and how to defend. Good to know for considering your own policies and processes when folks lose devices. https://www.scworld.com/perspective/why-mfa-downgrade-attacks-could-be-the-next-ai-security-crisis
Pure Storage Cloud: Run It Your Way or Fully Managed
November 6 | Register Now! Cloud shouldn't limit your options regardless if it's private, public, or hybrid. It's your data. It should be your choice to move it, and it should be your choice to determine where your workloads should run. See how Pure Storage Cloud gives you the freedom to choose your management model—customer-managed services that let you run it your way to a completely seamless, fully managed solution. Join us as we explore the Pure Storage Cloud portfolio, which brings the performance and agility of Pure Storage everywhere—giving you the power to choose. This session will explore: Efficient storage options for your workloads, no matter where they run The freedom that Pure Storage gives you for workload mobility The latest options for Pure Storage to do the heavy lifting in the public cloud Register Now!
