For Financial Services
Restoring Operational Trust After a Cyber Incident
When settlement systems go dark and Active Directory is gone, you cannot reopen the books from a helpdesk ticket.
Could you reopen the books tomorrow?
Ask your IT and operations teams to walk through this:
- Domain admin credentials are gone.
- The backup catalog is encrypted.
- Core banking and settlement systems are offline.
- Books and records cannot be accessed or updated.
How long before you can safely reopen operations and meet your regulatory reporting obligations?
Under four hours, you don't need us. If the answer involves uncertainty about whether transaction records can be trusted, that is the gap.
What has already happened
Nov 2023, ICBC Financial Services, New York LockBit ransomware. All systems blacked out including email. Employees resorted to manual workarounds. Settlement of over $9 billion in Treasury securities failed. US Treasury repo fails spiked to $62.2 billion in a single day. Books and records inaccessible and non-compliant from November 8, 2023 to March 1, 2024, nearly four months. SEC settled charges over the recordkeeping failure.
Jul 2024, India, shared banking infrastructure A single ransomware attack on one banking technology vendor took approximately 300 banks offline simultaneously. One vendor. One attack surface. Hundreds of institutions, none directly breached.
2025, South Korea, managed service provider One MSP compromised. Attackers used standing privileged credentials to move laterally into 32 financial institutions. Over one million files and more than 2TB of data extracted across a single campaign.
The pattern
The attack does not need to breach your perimeter directly. It targets identity, or a vendor with privileged access to your environment.
When identity falls, every system that depends on it for authentication falls with it. Including the backup infrastructure you planned to recover from. Including the books and records you are required by law to maintain.
ICBC had backups. They could not use them. The door was locked from the inside.
How HyperBUNKER closes the gap
A physically isolated restart kit for financial operations, deployed before an attack so the trusted dataset needed to reopen operations survives outside the blast radius.
- Active Directory database and domain controller images. Without it, no workstation, no application server, no trading terminal can re-authenticate.
- Core banking system configuration and database connection parameters.
- Settlement and payment system configuration, including messaging parameters for SWIFT, SEPA, TARGET2, or equivalent.
- Transaction ledger baseline and reconciliation records, point-in-time, multi-generational.
- Regulatory records and compliance documentation required under DORA, MiFID II, EMIR.
- PKI infrastructure, root certificates, master cryptographic keys, and restoration runbooks.
Why existing approaches fail
Every conventional tool depends on the infrastructure the intrusion just destroyed.
| What you have today | What happens in a destructive event |
|---|---|
| Backup catalog | Reached via the same Active Directory the intrusion now controls. Encrypted or deleted. ICBC's backup infrastructure fell with production. |
| Cloud backup with immutability | Reached via API credentials on the same network. Where credentials hold, restore latency is hours to days. Where they don't, the door is locked. |
| Third-party vendor DR | Your vendor's incident is your incident. Their recovery timeline is your recovery timeline. |
| Tape rotation | The restore process depends on tooling and credentials inside the blast radius. |
| HyperBUNKER | Physically unreachable. Contains identity infrastructure, core banking config, settlement system state, and regulatory records. Restart in hours from a known-clean baseline. |
The regulatory frame
DORA applies to all financial entities supervised under EU law, active since January 2025. Article 12 requires tested ICT business continuity and restoration procedures. Article 12 creates personal liability for management body members for ICT risk management failures. This is not a fine, it is career-ending accountability.
NIS2 Annex II covers banks and financial market infrastructure. Essential entity obligations apply to systemically significant institutions. Article 21(2)(c) requires tested backup management and disaster recovery capability.
HyperBUNKER is the demonstrable piece for any of these frameworks. A physical, tested, physically isolated recovery capability that a supervisory authority or auditor can inspect.
Validation & traction
Deployed in regulated, operationally critical environments.
- Independent European security assessment. Architecture and recovery methodology independently assessed by a recognised European security organisation.
- Recognised by major operational risk insurers. Accepted as a qualified recovery control for underwriting purposes.
- Utility patent granted. Core physical isolation architecture protected by a granted utility patent. Designed and manufactured in Europe.
Run the restart scenario with us
Twenty minutes. Architecture first. No pitch deck.
Walk through your financial operations restart timeline from cold, Active Directory gone, core banking encrypted. We bring the architecture brief and the DORA Article 12 benchmark. You find out in 20 minutes whether a recovery gap exists.