ENHANCING BACKUP SECURITY IN THE ERA OF CYBER THREATS

الملخص

Ransomware and related intrusions have transformed enterprise backup repositories from passive recovery assets into deliberate attack targets. This paper condenses a thesis-scale systematic literature review of backup security in the 2023–2026 threat landscape. Following a PRISMA-based process, 1,200 records from a broad database and repository search were reduced to 108 included sources. The corpus contains 38 empirical studies (35.2%) and 28 empirically grounded grey-literature sources (25.9%), for a combined evidence base of 66 sources (61.1%). The synthesis identified credential compromise, vulnerability exploitation, and lateral movement as the principal pathways into backup infrastructure. Immutable storage and physical air gaps received the strongest effectiveness ratings, whereas logical air gaps, cloud encryption, and AI/ML detection remained dependent on implementation quality; blockchain verification remained primarily theoretical. Thirty-seven initial codes were consolidated into nine research gaps, led by pre-restoration integrity verification and latent-malware detection. The paper proposes a Five-Layer Backup Resilience Framework—Prevention, Detection, Resilience, Response, and Governance—as a backup-specific operationalization of five NIST CSF 2.0 functions that also aligns with ISO 27001:2022, DORA, NIS2, SAMA, and NCA ECC. The framework is evidence-informed but has not been validated in a production environment; the results therefore support a structured research and implementation agenda rather than measured claims of deployment effectiveness.