Fsi Cyber Resilience

FSI Cyber Resilience

Workload Overview

Cyber resilience is the ability to holistically strengthen an organization's capacity to prevent, detect, respond to, and recover from cyber attacks, on the assumption that attacks will happen. The traditional "focus on prevention" mindset must shift to "continue the business even when attacked, and recover quickly." Defending against availability-affecting cyber events such as DDoS and ransomware is considered especially urgent.

This asset is a documentation-only reference architecture for financial institutions. It builds on the BLEA for FSI core-banking workload and adds three capabilities delivered as CDK samples in that core-banking usecase:

1. Logically air-gapped backup — replicating AWS Backup recovery points into an isolated Data Bunker account so ransomware-infected data cannot be silently propagated into, or tampered with in, the backup copy.
2. Cross-account restore to a fresh environment — recovering in a brand-new Restore account (assuming the production data center may still be infected), sharing the backup via AWS Resource Access Manager (RAM) rather than granting direct access to the Data Bunker account.
3. Automated network isolation — using Amazon GuardDuty to detect Critical threats and a Lambda function to rewrite Network ACLs, isolating the compromised core-banking workload to contain blast radius.

The design explicitly assumes a ransomware scenario: because infected data could be copied into backups, backups are logically isolated, and recovery targets an environment completely separate from production. Reference: FSA "Guidelines on Cyber Security in the Financial Sector," section 2.3.3 (Data Protection).

Best Practices and Key Components

Best Practices

• MUST: Take backups in the workload account with AWS Backup and replicate the recovery points into a separate, logically isolated Data Bunker account.
• MUST: Store the replicated backups in an AWS Backup Logically Air-gapped Vault so that read, modify, and delete operations are impossible during the retention period — even for users with administrator privileges or an attacker.
• MUST: Keep the workload account and the Data Bunker account within the same AWS Organizations, which is required for the cross-account backup copy and RAM sharing to work.
• MUST NOT: Access the Data Bunker account directly when a restore is needed; share the backup vault to the Restore account via AWS Resource Access Manager instead, to prevent unauthorized access to and tampering with backup data.
• MUST: Recover into a fresh Restore account on the assumption that the production environment is compromised, rather than restoring back into production.
• SHOULD: Rebuild application and infrastructure in the Restore account automatically with CDK, and automate database restore-from-backup with AWS Step Functions.
• MUST NOT: Automate reconnection of recovered databases to the workload; business impact assessment and risk judgment are required, so keep the cutover as a manual operational step (update the ECS task definition environment variables to point at the restored database, then restart the ECS tasks).
• MUST: Before starting recovery from backup, evaluate the integrity of the backup data.
• MUST: On a cyber event, promptly isolate affected systems and preserve evidence for incident investigation.
• SHOULD: Trigger automated network isolation only on GuardDuty findings of Severity 9.0 or higher (Critical); this mechanism reacts to Critical-level findings only.
• SHOULD: For isolation, dynamically create a Network ACL that permits only communication between the workload's subnets across the two Availability Zones and blocks all other inbound/outbound traffic.
• MUST: Notify administrators via Amazon SNS when isolation completes, and also send a notification on error.
• PREFER: Insert a human decision step between the Critical notification and the isolation action when isolation carries business impact, rather than isolating fully automatically.
• WILL: Because the core-banking workload runs on Amazon ECS Fargate, the container host is under AWS management responsibility, so investigation scope is limited and the Forensic account deploy/procedure is omitted from this asset.
• MAY: Deploy a separate Forensic account for tamper detection, malware scanning, and verification of data integrity and application dependencies; it is out of scope for this workload (see the AWS Security IR forensic resources).

Key Components

Workload Account

• Component Overview: Production account running the core-banking system (and similar workloads). AWS Backup takes backups here, and its backup plan is configured to copy recovery points to the Data Bunker account's air-gapped vault.
• Assumed AWS Services: AWS Backup, Amazon ECS (Fargate), Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon VPC.

Data Bunker Account

• Component Overview: A logically isolated account holding the backup data. It hosts an AWS Backup Logically Air-gapped Vault that receives cross-account copies of recovery points, and shares that vault to the Restore account via RAM on demand rather than allowing direct access.
• Assumed AWS Services: AWS Backup (Logically Air-gapped Vault), AWS Resource Access Manager, AWS Organizations.

Restore Account

• Component Overview: A fresh account that becomes the recovery target, assuming production is compromised. Application and infrastructure are rebuilt via CDK; database restore from the shared backup is automated with Step Functions; reconnection of the workload to the restored database is performed manually.
• Assumed AWS Services: AWS Step Functions, Amazon Aurora, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon ECS (Fargate), Elastic Load Balancing (ALB), AWS Resource Access Manager.

Forensic Account (out of scope)

• Component Overview: Account for tamper detection, malware scanning, and verification of data integrity and application dependencies on compromised systems. Deployment and procedures are omitted because the ECS Fargate host is under AWS management responsibility, limiting investigation scope.
• Assumed AWS Services: Not deployed in this asset; see AWS Security Incident Response forensic resources.

Automated Network Isolation

• Component Overview: On a Critical GuardDuty finding, an EventBridge rule triggers a Lambda function that creates and applies a Network ACL to the core-banking Protected Subnets, permitting only inter-AZ subnet traffic and blocking all other communication, then notifies administrators via SNS. Operates in the Primary Region only.
• Assumed AWS Services: Amazon GuardDuty, Amazon EventBridge, AWS Lambda, Amazon SNS, Amazon VPC (Network ACL).

FISC Compliance Summary

There is no dedicated FISC mapping file for this asset in the BLEA for FSI v1.6 source. The following regulatory considerations are the only ones present in the source documentation:

• The Japan Financial Services Agency (FSA) established the "Guidelines on Cyber Security in the Financial Sector," which define requirements for backup-related rule development and for responding to ransomware attacks. This asset cites its section 2.3.3 (Data Protection) as motivation for logically isolating backups and recovering in a completely separate environment.
• In response to those FSA guidelines, the FISC Security Guidelines (安全対策基準) added new criteria on strengthening cyber resilience, and the countermeasure content leveraging this reference architecture has been updated. The source points to the core-banking asset's FISC mapping file for the practical-standard countermeasures (fisc-mapping-core-banking.md), not to a mapping file of its own.

No FISC control-to-service mappings specific to cyber-resilience exist in the source, so none are asserted here.

Reference Architecture

The end-to-end architecture — account design (Workload / Data Bunker / Restore / Forensic), the three-step backup-restore flow, the automated network isolation flow, and all referenced AWS documentation, whitepapers, and guidelines — is detailed in references/architecture.md.

Operational, step-by-step procedures are captured in:

• references/backup-procedures.md — deploying the Logically Air-gapped Vault to the Data Bunker account and configuring cross-account backup copy.
• references/restore-procedures.md — RAM sharing, Step Functions database restore, and manual workload reconnection in the Restore account.
• references/isolation-procedures.md — GuardDuty-triggered automated network isolation architecture, deployment, testing, and limitations.

CDK Sample Overview

No standalone CDK sample directory is provided for this asset in BLEA for FSI v1.6; this asset is documentation only. The CDK deployment assets referenced by the procedures live inside the core-banking usecase (usecases/guest-core-banking-sample), selected via the CyberResilienceParameter option array ('backup' | 'restore' | 'isolation') in that usecase's bin/parameter.ts. See the reference files for the exact deploy commands as documented in the source.