Index Engines CyberSense Expands Support to Dell EMC PowerProtect Data Manager

Index Engines, Inc. has announced expanded support of its data integrity software, CyberSense, to include content secured in a Dell EMC PowerProtect Cyber Recovery vault with PowerProtect Data Manager.

CyberSense provides advanced data analysis software that directly scans backup data to check integrity, monitors suspect files to identify changes indicative of cyberattack, and provides forensic reporting to diagnose and recover from corruption.

“PowerProtect Data Manager is an exciting component of Dell EMC’s data protection portfolio and adding CyberSense support will add significant value to this platform by checking the data’s integrity to ensure it is free from corruption due to a ransomware attack,” said Jim McGann, VP. “With the existing integration of CyberSense with the PowerProtect Cyber Recovery isolated vault, now supporting replication of data using PowerProtect Data Manager, clients can deploy a state-of-the-art protection solution that will provide confidence that a cyberattack will not cripple the business operations.“

CyberSense was first integrated into PowerProtect Cyber Recovery, in 2019 and with increased demand and driven by the rise of ransomware, will be integrated with PowerProtect Data Manager. PowerProtect Data Manager is Dell EMC’s software platform for cloud data protection, which provides software-defined data protection, automated discovery, de-dupe, operational agility, self-service and IT governance features.

“The most recent headline-grabbing ransomware attack is a reminder that these types of attacks continue to gain in momentum and sophistication, requiring greater vigilance to assure that active primary and backup data stores containing business critical data are not corrupted by attackers,” said IT security analyst Paula Musich, research director, Enterprise Management Associates, Inc. “Combining data protection from a leading backup and storage system provider with in-depth analytics and integrity checking comes at the right time for today’s threat environment.” 

Using a combination of full-content-based analytics and ML, CyberSense generates alerts when signs indicate an attack may have occurred. When these attack vectors are identified, it provides forensic tools to diagnose and recover, including reports on files that were impacted and the last good backup set so they can be replaced with the last known good version to ensure business operations return to normal with minimal downtime.

It is a data analytics product that validates the integrity inside all files and databases on the initial scan vs. metadata only scans or sending sensitive content to the cloud for analysis. As a result, it detects even the most sophisticated corruption that hides inside files, providing 99.5% confidence in alerting an attack occurred.

CyberSense analysis compares data as it changes over time to detect suspicious behavior that is typical of cyber corruption. These analytics are processed by Cyber Sense’s ML model. The results are deterministic regarding the data’s integrity and if the data has been corrupted by a ransomware attack.

It also provides post attack forensic reports and details that assist in the diagnosis and recovery. It provides the attack vector utilized to manipulate the data as well as a listing of suspect files that have been manipulated, providing an understanding of the breadth of the attack. Most customers will reduce their recovery time from weeks and months, to hours and days due to the extensive diagnosis and forensic capabilities in CyberSense.

Support for PowerProtect Data Manager will be available in the CyberSense Version 7.7 release, which will be available 2Q21. 

CyberSense will initially support the following PowerProtect Data Manager workloads: block-based file system backups, file-based file system backups, VMware based VM backups and Oracle databases backups.

Currently, it supports popular backup applications including Dell EMC Avamar and NetWorker.