One of the leading hosting and IT infrastructure providers in Venezuela contacted Digital Recovery in a critical state after suffering a devastating .wait ransomware attack.
The incident directly compromised a VMware cluster, impacting dozens of customer environments and putting the company’s entire commercial operation at risk.
The situation was extremely sensitive: beyond the technical risk, there was contractual pressure, clients demanding immediate answers, and the real possibility of a prolonged shutdown of hosting services.
The attack resulted in the massive encryption of essential infrastructure components, including:
- VMware VMDK virtual disks
- Hosted customer servers
- Internal management machines
- Critical metadata from Veeam Backup & Replication
According to the IT director, the environment quickly became chaotic. Internal teams were no longer able to handle incoming calls, while affected clients called continuously demanding the immediate restoration of services.
Every minute of downtime increased the risk of contractual breaches, loss of credibility, and significant financial damage.
Initial Technical Analysis
After the emergency call, Digital Recovery’s engineers began a detailed analysis of the compromised environment. The infrastructure involved included:
- Hosts VMware ESXi
- Hybrid SAN/NAS storage
- Veeam Backup & Replication
- More than 40 customer virtual machines
Most of the VMDKs were encrypted, making any attempt at conventional startup or restoration unfeasible.
In addition, the Veeam catalogs and metadata had been corrupted, which would normally prevent standard restore processes. However, advanced analysis revealed a critical point: the physical Veeam backup blocks remained intact, despite the logical corruption of the metadata.
This detail was decisive for the recovery strategy.
Exclusive Recovery Approach
Given the complexity of the scenario, Digital Recovery applied an exclusive proprietary technology, specifically developed for situations where Veeam backups are logically compromised but physically preserved.
This advanced approach made it possible to:
- Direct extraction of data from the raw Veeam blocks
- Complete reconstruction of VMDKs, without relying on standard restore mechanisms
- Recovery of virtual machines even with unreadable Veeam catalogs and indexes
- Full restoration of:
- Operating systems
- Applications
- Configurations
- Original structure of the virtual environments
By completely bypassing the limitations of traditional tools, it was possible to recreate each virtual machine exactly as it was before the attack, maintaining logical and operational consistency.
The entire process was carried out without any interaction with the attackers and without paying a ransom, preserving the client’s legal and strategic integrity.
Final Result
The recovery project was completed with absolute success:
- The recovery project was completed with absolute success:
- No data loss
- No ransom payment
- Hosting services fully restored
- Customer environments delivered exactly in their pre-incident state
The Venezuelan infrastructure provider was able to restore operational stability, avoid severe contractual penalties, and most importantly, preserve the trust of its customer base at a critical moment.
Conclusion
Ransomware attacks on hosting and virtualised environments have an exponential impact, as they simultaneously affect multiple clients and critical services.
When Veeam backups have their metadata corrupted, generic solutions fail, making recovery extremely complex.
This case demonstrates how a specialised technical approach, combined with proprietary technologies, can make the difference between operational collapse and full recovery, even in the most adverse scenarios.
Digital Recovery reaffirms, through this project, its position as a specialist in recovering data encrypted by ransomware, especially in complex virtualised environments.
