Individual skill
recovering-from-ransomware-attack
Executes structured recovery from a ransomware incident following NIST and CISA frameworks, including environment isolation, forensic evidence preservation, clean infrastructure rebuild, prioritized system restoration from verified backups, credential reset, and validation against re-infection. Covers Active Directory recovery, database restoration, and application stack rebuild in dependency order. Activates for requests involving ransomware recovery, post-encryption restoration, or disaster recovery from ransomware.
internal/tools/skills/data/ransomware-defense/recovering-from-ransomware-attack/SKILL.md
Source commit d42f381ad34843e71a42658e5c57290c713e85af
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- Observed behavior
- Instructions only
- Last checked
- Nov 9, 2026
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- 1,327
- Repository last updated
- Nov 9, 2026
- License
- Apache-2.0
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- cybersecurity Repository topic
- security Repository topic
- bug-bounty Repository topic
- automation Repository topic
- autonomous-pentesting Repository topic
- ai-agent Repository topic
- ai-security Repository topic
- ethical-hacking Repository topic
- golang Repository topic
- penetration-testing Repository topic
- ransomware Declared skill tag
- recovery Declared skill tag
- incident-response Declared skill tag
- backup Declared skill tag
- defense Declared skill tag
- data Derived category
- devops Derived category
- data-databases Derived category
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# Recovering from Ransomware Attack
## When to Use
- After ransomware has encrypted production systems and the decision has been made to recover from backups
- When building or validating a ransomware recovery runbook before an actual incident
- After receiving a decryption key (paid ransom or law enforcement provided) and needing to safely decrypt
- When partial recovery is needed alongside decryption of remaining systems
- Conducting a recovery drill to validate RTO commitments
**Do not use** before completing containment and forensic scoping. Premature recovery without understanding the attacker's access and persistence mechanisms risks re-infection.
## Common Misconfigurations & Verification
- **Restoring a still-infected point:** the single most damaging mistake is restoring the most recent backup without confirming it predates patient-zero compromise. Attackers dwell ~21 days, so a "clean-looking" recent backup may already contain the dropper, web shell, or poisoned GPO. Verify the restore point's timestamp is earlier than the earliest known compromise (`wbadmin get versions`) and rebuild from golden images rather than decrypting in place.