Most organizations don’t find out their backup strategy doesn’t work until it’s too late.

On the surface, everything seems covered: backups are running, retention policies are in place, recovery plans have been tabletop tested, and someone did an assessment six months ago that said everything looked “adequate.” Maybe even “mature.”

But when ransomware hits, those checkboxes don’t mean much.

Because here’s the truth: Most assessments aren’t built around what happens in a real ransomware attack. They’re built around “best practices” and assumptions; they are not built based on actual threat actor behavior. And they leave IT and security teams with something dangerous: a false sense of readiness that won’t hold up under pressure.

We’ve been on the inside of hundreds of real-world breaches. We know where (and why) traditional assessments fall short—and how to build an approach that actually works.

What Traditional Assessments Get Wrong

Most assessments are built for compliance, not crisis.

They follow a predictable formula:

• Are backups running on a schedule?
• Are they stored offsite or in immutable storage?
• Is there a documented recovery plan?
• Has it been tested in the last 12 months?

Answer “yes” to those, and you’ll pass most assessments. There’s a problem, however. Attackers don’t care what’s on your compliance checklist. They care about what they can encrypt, exfiltrate, or destroy before you notice.

Here’s what typical assessments routinely ignore:

Threat actor behavior

Traditional assessments don’t test for enumeration or destruction of backups. These are the tactics attackers use first once they gain access. From hypervisor snapshots to recovery software, and domain-connected services, we’ve seen repeatedly that, in the real world, the backup infrastructure is usually their opening move. If your backups aren’t segmented from your domain (most aren’t), they’re already compromised.

Lateral movement

Traditional assessment reports tend to treat systems in isolation. File shares here, AD over there, backups in another bubble. In a real-world breach, threat actors move laterally and aggressively. A compromise of a domain-connected admin workstation could eventually lead to backup infrastructure if segmentation and access control aren’t airtight. Traditional assessments rarely simulate what happens if the attacker pivots from HR to IT Ops to infrastructure. There’s no test of containment (or the lack of it).

Stress testing

It’s one thing to restore a test VM in a controlled environment. It’s another thing to bring up critical systems with corrupted backups, compromised credentials, and executives demanding answers every five minutes. Traditional assessments ask, “Is there a plan?” when they should be asking, “Can your team execute this plan while half your staff is locked out and attackers are still active?”

Assumptions

People are often very confident about backup success rates. They shouldn’t be. A report might say 90% of backups complete successfully. But who is checking integrity and recoverability? Corrupted ACLs, misaligned agents, and application-level failures could render those “successful” backups useless.

Bottom line: most assessments are designed to confirm what you already think you know. They offer comfort, not clarity. They don’t challenge assumptions. They don’t model threat actors. And they don’t reflect the complexity of a real-world ransomware attack.

What Happens During a Breach

There’s a persistent myth that ransomware attacks are isolated, obvious, and easily remediated with a clean restore.

We’ve performed more than 300 ransomware recoveries, and we can tell you… that’s not true.

In our experience, your backups are a primary target. Threat actors aren’t just interested in encrypting data. They want to cripple recovery. They know the fastest way to get paid is to leave you no alternative. That’s why backup infrastructure is one of the first places they go.

Even in ideal conditions, restoring a production environment isn’t a button press. It’s a process involving network segmentation, credential resets, malware containment, infrastructure rebuilds, and validation of every system brought back online. Now add ransomware to the mix, where you’re dealing with partial or failed backups, unclear RPO/RTO decisions, missing runbooks, burned credentials, and pressure from across the organization—everyone from the board to legal, PR, execs, and regulators.

Your “mature plan” could collapse by hour two.

You Need a Different Kind of Assessment

While sometimes valuable, typical assessments rarely take a comprehensive view of the critical interrelationships between policies, product, people, and processes. They can’t help organizations prepare for ransomware events because they’re based on assumptions about data survivability, immutability, and MTTR (Mean Time to Recover) instead of a realistic assessment of how a company’s infrastructure and backups will survive a modern threat actor attack.

This is why we designed our Ransomware Backup & Resiliency Assessment (RBRA) to be fundamentally different.

Built and delivered by the Athena7 battalion under Fenix24, the RBRA flips the traditional assessment model on its head. Based on our real-world experience as the world’s leading ransomware recovery experts, we analyze your backup configurations and resiliency through “shoulder-surfing” and automated means so we can tell you how your company’s backups and infrastructure will perform in the face of today’s threat actors. We model our assessments on how ransomware attackers behave. It’s a practical evaluation based on thousands of hours in real-world post-breach environments.

The focus is on your survivability and recoverability.

Ultimately, the key to organizational resiliency is understanding both what will survive an attack and how long it will take for you to recover. To understand these, we assess:

• How much of your data will survive? Rarely is it 100%, even if ransom is paid.
• Will your backups survive/be usable? Our intel shows 80% of backup presumed immutable do not survive.
• Will your infrastructure, including AD, survive? This is needed to rehydrate recovered data and validate identity.
• Do you have sufficient storage, bandwidth, and connectivity? This is necessary to restore quickly.

The RBRA surfaces the gaps that would cripple you during a real attack, while there’s still time to close them. We dig into each of the questions above to provide you with a realistic assessment of exactly what data and which applications will survive and be usable, as well as offer a multi-step timeline for your recovery.

Validate Your Resiliency Before Attackers Do It for You

No threat actor has ever been stopped by a compliance checklist.

They don’t care how often your backups run or how well-organized your recovery documentation is. They certainly don’t care how confident you feel about your ability to restore and recover.

What they care about is access, privilege, and speed. If your systems give them a path to destroy backups, encrypt data, and cripple your operations, they’ll take it. And they’ll probably do it faster than your team is ready for. CrowdStrike’s 2025 Global Threat Report found that breakout times (how long it takes an attacker to start moving laterally across your network) are down to an average of 48 minutes. The fastest breakout time they saw was only 51 seconds.

That’s why we built the RBRA: to pressure-test your backup and recovery posture against the exact tactics real-world ransomware attackers use. No hypotheticals. No checkbox exercises. Just a clear look at where you’re vulnerable and what it will take to fix it.

Contact Fenix24 today to learn how the Ransomware Backup & Resiliency Assessment can help you prepare for the reality of a ransomware attack.