We often imagine cyberattacks as a digital siege; however, modern threat actors have abandoned brute force, opting instead for the stealth of a stolen key to unlock your systems. A report from the IDS Alliance indicated that 84% of organizations experienced a direct impact to business due to identity-related incidents, making digital identities one of the most commonly compromised attack vectors. These keys to your kingdom grant attackers unfettered access to apps, devices, and data for data theft and long-term persistence.
Unfortunately, fragmented IT and security tools often lack the ability to rapidly reverse malicious or accidental changes to identity providers like Active Directory (AD), Entra ID, or Okta. This exposes organizations to several negative impacts—significantly prolonged recovery times, pressure to pay ransoms to regain control, irreversible data loss, severe business disruption, and eroded trust in their security posture. This can turn an identity incident into a full-blown crisis.
In such a crisis, having a CTRL + Z for Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems is critical: the power to undo unwanted changes before a mistake becomes a disaster.
This is why an effective identity rollback strategy is a critical, yet often overlooked, component of modern cyber resilience. Cyber resilience is a security posture that acknowledges the inevitability of breaches and focuses on minimizing downtime and financial loss, thereby protecting customer trust and ensuring regulatory compliance.
But what is an identity rollback strategy? Why do CIOs and CISOs need a robust identity rollback strategy for Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems? Let’s take a closer look at identity rollback and how Rubrik can help you to effectively implement an identity rollback strategy.
What is an Identity Rollback Strategy?
An identity rollback strategy is the documented methodology and technical capability to rapidly and accurately undo unwanted, unauthorized, or catastrophic changes to an organization's identity infrastructure. This ensures that the integrity and availability of identity objects, attributes, and access permissions can be restored to a clean state.
Without an identity rollback strategy, organizations often face slow, manual, and error-prone recovery processes, often dependent on incomplete audit trails or compromised backups.
Top 4 Reasons an IAM Rollback Strategy Is Critical for CIOs and CISOs
For CIOs, an identity rollback strategy is critical because fast rollbacks minimize the Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) for identity systems. A faster recovery means less time spent on manual, chaotic fixes and more time on strategic projects. Keeping the core identity infrastructure clean, stable, and easier to manage ultimately lowers long-term support and maintenance costs.
For CISOs, rollback capabilities allow the security teams to surgically undo malicious changes like a privilege escalation or a harmful group membership change. This is a crucial Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) capability. Moreover, immutable audit logs provide critical information for forensics and aid in obtaining or renewing compliance certifications.
Let’s explore in more detail the reasons that CIOs and CISOs need a robust identity rollback strategy:
1. Ensure reliable monitoring & undo malicious modifications to IdP: Once an attacker compromises an identity system, they can escalate privileges, modify GPOs, create backdoors, sabotage backups, and disrupt operations without being detected by traditional security tools. This is because traditional defenses, such as endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools, can’t stop adversaries who blend in as legitimate users by compromising identities.
But once these malicious actions come to light, the CISO has to move fast to reduce the blast radius of the attack. If successful, the CIO’s team will spend less time on fixing the compromised IT infrastructure and can allocate more resources to strategic tasks and activities and enhance business resilience.
A robust identity rollback plan is essential to swiftly and precisely reverse unwanted configuration changes, mass deletions, faulty patches, or modifications to critical security groups. This allows organizations to undo malicious actions (privilege escalation, GPO modification, backdoor creation, etc.) without a time-consuming system rebuild. This strategy relies on near real-time monitoring of identity providers and immutable audit logs, enabling the rollback of specific changes to users, groups, GPOs, roles, or policies to a secure state within minutes. It is also critical to have tamper-resistant monitoring to investigate the actions of bad actors and undo malicious modifications.
By reducing identity configuration loss by granularly rolling back, organizations can save days or even weeks of lost time fighting a breach. Moreover, identifying and rolling back the attacker’s modifications limits reinfection.
2. De-risk and simplify rollback with a consolidated tech stack for data and identity: Many organizations rely on fragmented, disjointed tools for identity security and data backups. This can lead to operational friction, blind spots, and increased risk during an identity rollback. Moreover, point solutions often require manual processes for remediation and recovery, increasing the total cost of ownership.
To effectively de-risk and simplify recovery across identity and data, organizations must adopt a consolidated tech stack. Such an approach provides single-pane-of-glass visibility and cohesive audit trails for rapid root cause analysis, enables synchronized backups for definitive state integrity, and streamlines recovery to eliminate the human error associated with managing multiple point solutions.
CIOs and CISOs who are looking to consolidate their team’s tech stack should consider deploying a unified platform that integrates rollback capabilities with identity and data posture management to simplify operations. This will allow organizations to replace multiple point solutions with a single, cohesive system. More importantly, organizations will be able to combine backups across data and identity in one platform, enabling teams to roll back the environment to a clean slate.
This consolidation strengthens the overall security posture, streamlines workflows for SecOps and Identity and Access Management (IAM) teams, encourages collaboration, and ultimately lowers the total cost of ownership.
3. Ensure compliance and maintain an audit trail: Regulatory frameworks demand proof of secure and verifiable recovery workflows. For CIOs and CISOs, demonstrating cyber resilience to regulatory bodies is a core requirement.
A documented identity rollback plan provides tangible proof of your ability to restore trust in identity infrastructure after an incident. Part of this effective rollback strategy is an immutable audit log that tracks who changed what, and when. This provides a tamper-resistant record for compliance audits and forensic investigations. Moreover, orchestrated and clean recovery workflows ensure that your organization can confidently restore operations without reintroducing threats.
These capabilities are critical for meeting compliance mandates like GDPR, which require verifiable recovery processes and assurance that identities and access controls are uncompromised.
4. Ensure business continuity and build cyber resilience: Cyberattacks often involve identity sabotage, such as creating new privileged accounts, changing GPO startup scripts, or altering access policies. When identity systems are compromised, the entire business can come to a halt, leading to significant financial losses. For example, Ingram Micro, a global IT product distributor, faced nearly $136 million of losses per day and a multi-day recovery time after their identity systems were breached, likely by the SafePay ransomware group.
An automated and orchestrated identity rollback plan is crucial for quickly restoring trust in the identity infrastructure. The ability to instantly pinpoint and roll back malicious or accidental changes to a known-good state drastically reduces recovery time from weeks or months to hours, minimizing business disruption and ensuring operational continuity. Remember that business continuity begins when trust in identity systems is restored.
Resilience goes beyond just recovery; it involves hardening your security posture, early threat detection, rapid threat containment, and restoration of trust. Rollback is a core pillar of resilience, bridging the gap between alert, investigation, and recovery in a single, streamlined workflow.
Ultimately, a rollback strategy allows you to prove trust in your identity infrastructure and reduce the blast radius of an attack.
Real-Life Cyberattack: Rolling Back Changes to Identity Systems
Imagine a threat actor like Scattered Spider, a cybercriminal group that executes highly disruptive attacks, gains initial access to your identity and access management systems through social engineering. Once inside, they escalate privileges by adding a user to the Domain Admins group in Active Directory and modify a GPO to deploy ransomware via a startup script.
Without a rollback plan, your team would face a manual, high-stress situation:
Prolonged Downtime: Manual recovery of identity systems can take days, during which your business is down. You might need to manually correlate alerts to identify malicious changes.
Compromised audit logs: Relying on potentially compromised audit logs means that your team cannot conduct a full forensic audit during a post-mortem of the incident.
Difficult AD recovery: If your organization uses AD, you might face a full, 20+ step AD forest recovery for each domain. This can take days, during which time your business is down.
Outsmarting attacker groups like Scattered Spider is easier with a rollback plan powered by a consolidated, hybrid-first (Active Directory, Entra ID, and soon Okta) tool like Rubrik:
Detection: Rubrik detects the unauthorized (and likely malicious) changes to the privileged group membership and the GPO modification in real time.
Hardening security posture: Rubrik supports hardening your security posture. Rubrik scans for misconfigurations in your IdP settings and identities, enabling you to identify gaps and remediate them.
Investigation: Security teams use Rubrik’s immutable and searchable change log to see who made what change and when. Rubrik helps to integrate and correlate these actions with alerts from tools like Crowdstrike so that users do not need to manually make those correlations. This creates a unified timeline that links an attacker's actions with the specific changes they made to the identity infrastructure. In addition, Rubrik can also connect identity risks to the sensitive data they can access.
Rollbacks: Surgical rollbacks allow organizations to revert malicious or unwanted changes to the last known safe state. For example, Rubrik Active Directory Forest Recovery (ADFR) quickly reverts malicious changes to your AD infrastructure.
Protecting your organization from the devastating impact of identity-based attacks demands immediate, surgical recovery. Implementing a robust identity rollback strategy helps to eliminate persistence, satisfy compliance, and maintain business continuity, transforming what used to be weeks of disruption into mere minutes of resolution, all with a platform that is like a simple Ctrl + Z for identity attacks.
See Rubrik’s Identity Resilience solution in action.
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