VIDEO PODCAST
Commvault's Vidya Shankaran on Recovering from a Cyberattack
James Maguire
August 26, 2025

In this TechVoices conversation, I spoke with Vidya Shankaran, Field CTO at Commvault, about how AI is reshaping the threat landscape, why true cyber resilience starts with people and processes (not just tools), and why “human-in-the-loop” remains essential.

In a wide ranging conversation, we also covered what post-quantum cryptography (PQC) means in practice—including a pragmatic path to crypto agility where classical and PQC approaches coexist.

Core Takeaways
AI has upskilled attackers
GenAI makes social engineering far more convincing and democratizes sophisticated tools, so resilience must span people, process, and technology—with humans both the weakest link and the first line of defense.
Recovery must be designed in advance
Define your organization's minimum viable business —the essential capabilities and data you must restore first—or risk being "shot at the knees" when an incident occurs.
LLM poisoning is real
Adversaries can game rankings or hijack expired domains to seed bad data; without rigorous human validation, AI systems can amplify corrupted inputs and warp downstream decisions.
Prepare for post-quantum, pragmatically
Symmetric encryption remains strong, but data-in-transit and long-dwell exfiltration face future quantum risks. Plan for crypto agility —selective adoption of NIST-advocated schemes where they matter most, while classical crypto continues elsewhere.
KEY QUOTES

GenAI Has Upskilled the Adversary

We're well past the era of the obvious 'Nigerian prince.' Even when those messages show up today, they're phrased with professional polish. That's GenAI at work—democratizing powerful capabilities and dramatically elevating the quality of social engineering and other attack vectors.
Because of that shift, cyber resilience can't be treated as a pure IT problem. It's people, process, and technology together. Humans are simultaneously the weakest link and the first line of defense, so organizations have to design for that reality—not just buy more tools.

Recovery Begins with Minimum Viable Business

A true recovery mindset starts long before an incident. Too many organizations think technology spend alone solves resilience. It doesn't. You must know the minimum viable capabilities your business needs to function the day after an attack.
Take healthcare: patient onboarding, access to EHR data—allergies, medications, treatment plans. If you can't bring those back quickly, you're effectively out of business. Map and prioritize those essentials now, or you'll be making impossible tradeoffs under pressure.

LLM Poisoning & Why Humans Must Stay in the Loop

As organizations adopt AI, large models often rely on pre-ranked sources or snapshots. Adversaries can game those rankings—or buy expired domains and repopulate them with spurious content—to 'poison the well.' The result: your first AI answer could be confidently wrong.
That's why a human-in-the-loop is non-negotiable. Expecting full autonomy is risky; it creates an echo chamber that warps our understanding of the world. You need human eyes validating datasets and outputs, especially where decisions have real-world consequences.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Maguire
Executive Director
An award-winning journalist, James has held top editorial roles in several leading technology publications, covering enterprise trends in cloud computing, AI, data analytics, cybersecurity and more. He regularly communicates with industry analysts and experts and has interviewed hundreds of technology executives.
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