Cyber recovery is the process of restoring systems, data, and business operations after a cyber incident while checking that what comes back is clean, intact, and trustworthy. It goes beyond ordinary backup restore or disaster recovery. A system may boot successfully and still be unsafe if attackers changed files, implanted persistence, tampered with data, or corrupted an automated workflow.
This matters because modern attacks often target both availability and integrity. Ransomware, destructive malware, data poisoning, and identity compromise can all survive a simple restart. Effective cyber recovery therefore includes clean restore points, validation of logs and datasets, verification of model or application behavior, and controlled reintroduction into production. In practice, defenders use recovery drills to prove they can rebuild from trusted sources, detect hidden compromise, and resume operations without reintroducing the original weakness.