When ransomware strikes, the difference between prolonged disruption and controlled recovery often comes down to trusted restoration of your data.

When a hospitality company faced a sophisticated ransomware attack that impacted critical systems, they achieved a full recovery—without paying a ransom—using Druva.

Here’s how it unfolded.

Identifying the Threat

Business was operating as usual—until it wasn’t.

The first signs appeared quickly. Encryption alerts cascaded across production systems. Core applications went dark. Access to critical systems was lost. Within hours, customer IT teams confirmed the cause: Qilin ransomware, a highly targeted and coordinated threat.

Qilin (also known as Agenda) is not a typical ransomware strain. Already linked to hundreds of attacks across industries, it operates as a Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) platform with coordinated execution that limits early warning signals, compresses response times, and increases operational impact. By combining technical sophistication with operational scale, Qilin is one of the most impactful ransomware ecosystems observed in recent years.

Qilin At a Glance:

• 700+ attacks reported in 2025
• Multi-platform payloads: Windows, Linux, VMware ESXi
• Double extortion: data theft + encryption
• Broad targeting: healthcare, manufacturing, government, education, finance

For the hospitality company’s IT and security teams, the challenge was immediate and twofold: contain the attack and ensure that recovery would not reintroduce compromised data.

Engaging Druva for Trusted Recovery

Despite the scope of the attack, one critical safeguard held: backup data remained immutable, air-gapped, and uncompromised within the Druva Data Security Cloud.

That changed the equation.

Now, instead of reacting under pressure or considering ransom payment, the team had a viable path forward—one grounded in clean, recoverable data. The hospitality company engaged Druva’s Global Customer Support and aligned on a clear objective: to rapidly restore only verified clean data—nothing else.

Leveraging the Druva Cloud as a strategic control point, the team moved from uncertainty to a structured, evidence-based recovery.

Mitigating The Threat with Clean, Controlled Restores

With critical VMware, file system, and SQL data still encrypted, the focus shifted to validation.

The team immediately enforced Druva Safe Mode to lock down the backup environment. This added an instant layer of protection by implementing granular restrictions across all backup jobs, restores, and download operations. 

To ensure the integrity of the recovery, the team utilized Druva’s Restore Scan to analyze affected workloads. Moving beyond basic integrity checks, this process cross-referenced file hashes against Druva’s curated ransomware IoC library—powered by ReconX—while simultaneously performing signature-based antivirus detection.

This process identified clean, trusted recovery points with confidence, enabling a precise recovery plan without guesswork or risk of reinfection.

To further reduce risk, the team employed a sandbox-first recovery approach. Using Sandbox Recovery, backups were restored into an isolated environment for verification. Data integrity was confirmed and cross-checked for residual threats under controlled conditions.

Only after passing these checks were workloads restored to production.

This layered approach—validate, isolate, then restore—ensured recovery was not just fast, but clean and secure.

The Customer Outcome: No Ransom, No Reinfection

With trusted data and a controlled recovery process, the hospitality company restored critical systems and resumed operations with minimal disruption.

What could have resulted in extended outages, revenue loss, and reputational damage became a measured, business-aligned recovery.

This incident reinforces a critical truth: ransomware recovery is no longer just about data availability. Instead, it requires early detection, tamper-proof backups, and controlled, actionable, and trustworthy restoration points.

Druva’s platform played a central role in enabling that outcome—combining layered security, threat-aware validation, and isolated recovery workflows to cleanly recover at scale.

Final Takeaway

Threat actors continue to evolve—but so do the strategies to combat them.

This case demonstrates that with the right preparation, tooling, and support, organizations can confidently drive better recovery outcomes—without paying attackers or compromising integrity.

Because in modern ransomware recovery, both speed and certainty matters.

Ready for ransomware? Read our technical blog to see how Druva addresses clean, confident recovery from Qilin exploits.