Cobalt Iron patents its cyber event responsiveness

Patent No. 3683705, granted by the European Patent Office on 17^th Jan 2024, describes techniques that will improve monitoring, detection, impact analysis, and automated reconfiguration of IT infrastructure and operations when cyber threats arise. These functions, which will be available in the Cobalt Iron Compass enterprise SaaS backup platform, will provide insights for businesses at the most critical and stressful times – when under attack – and will perform automated remediation procedures to reduce exposure and damage.

Cyber-criminal activities continue to increase in number and grow in sophistication. These activities commonly exploit IT infrastructures, most of which are vulnerable because they are statically configured, run outdated software, and are completely unresponsive when conditions change and threats occur. Outsmarting the criminals requires continual improvement in monitoring, detecting, and analysing cyber threats, and automatically remediating the infrastructure to counteract them. Companies need more dynamic means of reconfiguring IT infrastructure in response to external conditions and events, including cyber attacks, so they can arm themselves against cyber threats.

Cobalt Iron's newly patented techniques introduce unique cyber threat analytics and automated optimisations that will kick in in response to cyber events.

When the techniques are fully implemented into Compass, Compass will be able to:

• Determine the interdependencies between various hardware devices of the environment and directories, files, databases, and data.
• Continually monitor metrics, events, and conditions for indications of a cyber attack in the network.
• Analyse metrics, events, conditions, and configurations to identify hardware devices and data that may be impacted by or vulnerable to a cyber attack.
• Automatically create an audit report of impacted hardware devices and data.
• Automatically initiate remediation operations for impacted or vulnerable devices and data. Remediation operations may include things such as:

• Restricting access to impacted or vulnerable devices and data.
• Initiating data replication of a previous clean backup version of the data to an off-site location.
• Initiating recovery and validation of affected data to a safe storage location.

As an example, the disclosed techniques will monitor metrics, events, and conditions in the environment. Upon indications of a cyber attack, Compass could perform impact analysis to identify hardware devices and data impacted by the attack, and then it could take remediation actions, such as restricting access to the identified devices and data to limit further damage.

"Detecting cyber attacks, determining the scope of impact, and taking proper remediation actions are all critical aspects of a cyber security game plan. This patent introduces cyber event analytics that provide insights into an attack. It also introduces automated remediation operations to limit the impact of an attack and further secure data," said James Kost, Senior Systems Engineer at Cobalt Iron. "Cobalt Iron is focused on protecting and securing business data, so we continue to innovate in the areas of ransomware analytics and automated IT infrastructure optimisations."