What's New: CyberSense® Elevates Ransomware Defense for Cyber Recovery Solutions

Index Engines' mantra is that cyber recovery is a team effort, involving Info Sec, IT, and infrastructure teams. CyberSense release 8.10 adds to our industry-leading data integrity checking by strengthening ransomware detection, security posturing, performance, and workload protection.

The new updates to CyberSense enhance security and efficiency with features like raw disk attack detection in VMs, custom malware detection, improved RBAC, upgraded threshold alerts, enhanced Delta Block Analysis, and various other enhancements. These features reinforce CyberSense's leadership in cyber recovery and ensure robust protection against evolving threats.

Raw Disk Attack Detection

This release of CyberSense introduces industry-first detection of raw disk attacks within virtual machines. These attacks start by encrypting files and then corrupting the master boot record, making file data inaccessible. Through this two-staged attack, bad actors can hide their tracks, making recovery more difficult. When detected, CyberSense immediately prompts investigation, notifying users that the disk may have been encrypted or erased by ransomware,alerting users to a potential raw disk attack. This enhancement helps identify raw disk attacks that traditional solutions miss, further solidifying the Dell PowerProtect Cyber Recovery and CyberSense as the market leading solution in comprehensive cyber recovery solutions.

Advanced Malware Detection

This release significantly enhances CyberSense's malware detection capabilities, providing critical depth to the security posture of Dell PowerProtect Cyber Recovery. With the introduction of custom signatures, users can now supply their own signatures complementing the 4,000+ signatures CyberSense already uses to analyze backups, enabling CyberSense to search both existing and future backups for malware that matches these signatures. Users can identify dormant ransomware executables in backups post-attack, ensuring cleaner data restoration and preventing reinfection.

Custom YARA rules enable organization-specific threat detection, allowing CyberSense to address threats proactively. This capability reinforces CyberSense's leadership in cyber recovery by offering tailored protection against evolving threats. For enhanced security monitoring, users can incorporate these alerts into existing security workflows, creating a seamless threat response ecosystem.

For both malware signatures and YARA rules, in the event of a match, the system delivers notifications through the CyberSense GUI, e-mail alerts, and integration with SIEM platforms through syslog.

Expanded Workload Support

CyberSense now supports a broader range of enterprise backup workloads, giving organizations the flexibility to strengthen cyber recovery across complex, mixed IT environments.

• PowerProtect Data Manager 19.18 & 19.19

• Avamar 19.12, Networker 19.12

• Commvault Backup and Recovery 11.36

• NetBackup 10.5, including NetBackup OST (Open Storage Technology)

• Oracle ASMRMAN

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC)

This release introduces enhancements to Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) by supporting custom roles with custom permissions. This improvement provides more precise control over user permissions, enhancing security and compliance by ensuring that users have appropriate access levels tailored to their specific roles and responsibilities.

Improved Threshold Alerts

CyberSense now includes enhanced threshold alerts and visualization capabilities that transform how security teams monitor and respond to potential threats. The new graded alert system allows users to configure notifications based on customizable severity levels—Critical, High, Medium, and Low—enabling more nuanced monitoring, even in the absence of a ransomware attack.

Complementing this feature, the redesigned Hosts page now displays critical metrics like changed, deleted, and added files as both percentages and absolute quantities on intuitive graphs. These visualizations clearly show metric trends over time with integrated severity thresholds, allowing security teams to quickly identify when metrics are approaching alert conditions and prioritize their response efforts accordingly.

Enhanced Delta Block Analysis (DBA)

Additionally, this release introduces Delta Block Analysis (DBA) visualization, displaying DBA scores on a timeline graph. This enhancement builds upon the existing AI-powered DBA technology that efficiently scans only changed blocks to detect suspicious activity. The new visualization provides an intuitive way to review and monitor CyberSense's Delta Block analysis.

Simplified Threshold Configuration

Simplified path configuration for custom thresholds and reduces are also now included, reducing setup complexity and potential errors and making it easier for users to configure and manage their systems. These enhancements ensure that CyberSense remains versatile and user-friendly, capable of supporting a wide range of IT environments and applications.

The Bottom Line

This release of CyberSense represents a significant advancement in cyber recovery technology, delivering industry-first capabilities like raw disk attack detection alongside enhanced malware identification through custom signatures and YARA rules. With improved visualization, configurable threshold alerts, expanded workload support, and strengthened RBAC, this release empowers organizations to detect threats earlier, respond faster, and protect their critical data more effectively across heterogeneous environments. As cyber threats continue to evolve, CyberSense reinforces Dell PowerProtect Cyber Recovery's position as the market leader in comprehensive cyber resilience solutions.

For detailed feature information please check out our Release Notes.

About the Authors

Rob Mossi is the Senior Director of Product Marketing at Index Engines and Drew Bongiovanni is the Technical Marketing Manager at Index Engines.