# What is Cyber Recovery?

> Cyber recovery is the discipline of restoring systems and data after a destructive cyberattack — where the attack itself may have corrupted or reached the very backups and tools normal recovery relies on.

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## Content

Traditional disaster recovery assumes infrastructure failure; cyber recovery assumes an adversary worked to destroy recovery options — encrypted backups, stolen admin credentials, poisoned snapshots, persistence in restore images. It therefore adds isolated or immutable copies, verified-clean restoration, rebuilt credentials, and the ability to operate while the environment is still contested.

### Key points

- **Isolated recovery path:** Keep recovery copies, credentials, and the restore environment separated from production identity and network so one compromise cannot reach both.
- **Pre-restore verification:** Restoring infected or attacker-seeded images returns the adversary with the data; validate clean points and rebuild trust anchors rather than rolling back blindly.
- **Important limitation:** Cyber recovery is slower and more expensive than ordinary restore. Clean-room rebuilds, credential resets, and forensic validation take time the RTO may not allow — which is why it must be exercised, not assumed.

### Related terms

[Disaster recovery](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/disaster-recovery/>) · [Immutable backup](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/immutable-backup/>) · [Business continuity](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/business-continuity/>) · [Recovery time objective (RTO)](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/recovery-time-objective/>) · [Incident response (IR)](<https://yellowcube.eu/glossary/incident-response/>)

### Sources

[NIST SP 800-184, Guide for Cybersecurity Event Recovery](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/800/184/final) · [NIST SP 1800-11, Data Integrity: Recovering from Ransomware and Other Destructive Events](https://csrc.nist.gov/pubs/sp/1800/11/final)

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