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FRM Part II · FRM Exam Part II · Risk Mitigation

A bank discovers that ransomware has encrypted production servers. Backups exist, but they are stored on the same network domain with the same administrator credentials as production. Which mitigation weakness is most significant?

The main weakness is that backups share the production network and credentials, so they are not isolated or immutable. Attackers who gain administrator access can encrypt or delete them too, defeating recovery. Isolated, offline or immutable backups preserve a clean restore point.

  1. ABackups are not isolated or immutable, so attackers can also compromise themCorrect
  2. BBackups are taken too infrequently to meet audit requirements
  3. CEncryption keys for production data are too long
  4. DProduction servers are not insured against hardware failure

Explanation

Ransomware actors commonly seek out and encrypt or delete backups reachable with the same credentials. Backups that are offline, segregated or immutable remain usable for recovery. Frequency matters for recovery point objectives but is not the stated flaw, and key length is irrelevant here.

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