Ransomware Attacks: How to Stay Calm and Protect Your Data?

Ransomware has become a major cyber threat to businesses and organizations worldwide. The United States has become the number one target area for ransomware attacks due to the gap between the data protection measures of many local companies and their digital transformation. The complex IT environment brought by the hybrid multi-cloud era has further provided a breeding ground for ransomware. As a result, an unsuspecting ransomware attack can cause unplanned downtime and irreversible damage to business and reputation.

So, when ransomware is around the corner, how can enterprises be prepared and respond calmly? If enterprises have already been attacked by ransomware, how can they minimize losses? The answers to these two questions for enterprise data security are both inseparable from the ability of enterprises to withstand ransom attacks - anti-ransomware resilience.

Never too early to improve anti-ransomware resilience

The best time for enterprises to build ransomware resilience is before attacks. To effectively improve their resilience against ransomware, companies can follow these guidelines:

• Decentralize data. Enterprises can maintain at least three copies of data on two different types of media (such as disk and cloud), at least one copy in an off-site or isolated location, and at least one on anti-tamper storage.
• Store data securely. Encrypting data can make it more difficult for ransomware to identify the data. Additionally, if storage is attacked by ransomware, encrypted files are more difficult to circulate and share online, which prevents attackers from publicly distributing important information.
• Ongoing and regular backups. Frequent backups can help businesses reduce recovery time, which can save seconds, minutes or even hours. 46% of enterprises back up data less than once every 12 hours. In the event of a ransom attack or server failure, enterprises will face the risk of permanent data loss.
• Periodic automated recovery testings. To ensure effective recovery of backup data and guarantee business continuity, it is necessary for enterprises to perform periodic recovery testings. Aurreum can help enterprises minimize the impact on the production system during recovery testings.
• Data protection in the cloud. More and more U.S. companies are migrating data to the cloud, but many of them do not clearly understand that the security of their data assets in the cloud should be protected by themselves, and still rely on the standard backup and recovery tools of public cloud service providers (CSPs). The current CSP products cannot meet the security requirements of enterprises. Only relying on CSP tools will reduce the visibility of the multi-cloud environment and increase the risk of vulnerabilities. Therefore, organizations need to determine the extent to which they rely on CSP backup and recovery tools, and get a solid understanding of the need for a robust third-party data protection solution.

As ransomware attacks become increasingly “smart” and common, Aurreum recommends that enterprises adopt a comprehensive data protection strategy against ransomware in the complex hybrid multi-cloud era and ensure that IT services and business operations are not affected. Ransomware prevention is not a one-time solution, but building anti-ransomware resilience and ensuring fast data recovery can help enterprises build a complete defense mechanism and face cyber threats with more confidence.