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ransomware
FDD urges NIST, NSA to evaluate vaultless, keyless pseudonymization as safeguard against ransomware attacks
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies argues that encryption alone cannot protect sensitive data as it moves through cloud platforms, vendors, backups, and artificial intelligence (AI) pipelines, since adversaries can access unencrypted data during authorized processing. The organization proposes vaultless, keyless pseudonymization as a complementary defense that replaces sensitive values with realistic substitutes while preserving data usability, and calls on the National Institute of Standards and Technology and National Security Agency to evaluate the approach's security benefits and operational requirements. FDD's testing found the method could restrict restoration of original values to authorized parties, log unauthorized attempts, and revoke downstream access to pseudonymized tokens.
Why it matters: Hospitals, banks, defense contractors, and government agencies handling sensitive data need to understand this emerging defense category, as current encryption-only strategies leave data vulnerable during processing and data movement when threat actors or insiders have system access; procurement teams should demand vendors clarify their data protection and restoration capabilities.
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