7  Steps to Defend Your Enterprise Data from Ransomware

Ransomware is a growing security problem and one of the biggest forms of cybercrime organizations face today. Every day, news feeds feature criminal stories. It unabashedly declares that they are holding back serious data until the ransom is paid. And there is no guarantee that this data will be recovered even if you pay the ransom. Steps to Defend Your Enterprise

Run by well-funded criminal organizations with full-time developer teams, ransomware has become a lucrative business. According to CyberSecurity Ventures [1], ransomware claims a new victim every 5 seconds, and, Steps to Defend Your Enterprise in 2021, damage costs worldwide have reached $ 20 billion. That’s a 57-fold increase in just 6 years – more than enough to keep your RSSI awake at night.

There has been an increase in new strains of ransomware and other malware threats. And the data keeps growing from one end to the cloud. Your business and customer data are at greater risk than ever before. In this rapidly changing environment, businesses must act quickly to protect critical data.

With the increase in new strains of ransomware and other malware threats and the continued growth of data from the edge to the cloud, your business and customer data is at greater risk than ever. In this rapidly changing environment, businesses must act quickly to protect critical data.

Data protection is a crucial line of defense against ransomware. Secure backup images of critical business data and applications allow businesses to go back to recover applications and data before the point of ransomware infection. While many data protection solutions on the market promise to support backup and restore, most of them only offer partial protection. Legacy solutions are not immune to ransomware once data center systems are affected.

Can you prevent ransomware attacks?

Attacks happen. It is not a question of if, but when. As long as cybercriminals believe your data is valuable, they will continue to exploit vulnerabilities and find innovative ways to encrypt critical data. This means that investing in recovery is just as essential as prevention. Including data protection in your cybersecurity framework is a requirement for cyber resilience. Here are 7 best practices that can help you mitigate the risk of ransomware attacks and prepare your business for a speedy recovery.

    1.  Use both disaster recovery and backup solutions

Backup is part of every cyber resilience plan. Ransomware is a disaster scenario, therefore organizations should also include Disaster Recovery (DR) in this plan. Modern disaster recovery solutions offer granular recovery checkpoints and the ability to recover entire sites or applications with just a few clicks. These solutions enable significantly lower recovery point goals (RPOs) and faster recovery time goals (RTOs).

Protecting multi-layered data using the 3-2-1-1 rule remains crucial. Store three copies of your data on two different types of media, one stored offsite and the second stored offline. Organizations using both disaster recovery and backup solutions to create impenetrable, multi-layered defense are able to remediate risk and get up and running much faster after encryption. Steps to Defend Your Enterprise End-to-end data protection solutions, such as those offered by HPE, allow you to easily adopt the 3-2-1-1 rule to ensure data integrity and maximize the availability of applications and data for your business. business.

2. Test, test, and test to ensure recover 

Most organizations are unsure of their ability to recover once an attack occurs, usually due to infrequent testing of their disaster recovery and backup solutions. It is imperative that organizations prove their ability to recover by fully testing all recovery operations, from failovers to file-level recoveries. Mimic real disaster and recovery scenarios to make sure administrators follow protocols and documentation, especially during ransomware recovery simulations.

3. Isolate backup data

Cybercriminals typically attempt three insidious techniques in an attempt to force a ransom payment: encrypt, modify, or delete an organization’s data. If the data changes, the ransomware changes the storage blocks and your backup system ends up backing up the changed and now encrypted files. Immutable backups keep backed up data out of reach, effectively building a wall against ransomware attacks. Systems such as HPE StoreOnce Catalyst provide immutable backups that cannot be encrypted, modified, Steps to Defend Your Enterprise, or deleted. HPE data protection solutions completely isolate data wherever it resides to prevent it from being tampered with, intentionally or unintentionally. Secure by design, these solutions make backup images invisible and inaccessible to ransomware, ensuring data integrity and enabling data recovery in the event of an attack.

4. Improve your RPOs

How often you make a backup determines your data loss. For organizations using nightly / daily backups, this can mean hours or a whole day of data loss. If you’re looking to reduce data loss, now is the time to rethink your data protection frequency for better RPOs.HPE Data Protection Solutions allow you to deliver RPOs of seconds using Continuous Data Protection (CDP) as well as backup solutions. Which are for better recovery time and longer storage period. Enables near-continuous data protection for more frequent backups.

5.  Speed up your RTO

The attacks happen, and quickly. so It is important to use the 3-2-1-1 rule to protect yourself from data loss. and it is equally important to prepare for a quick recovery each time. because the longer your business waits to be operational again, the greater the damage.

Data protection solutions with integrated orchestration and automation enable predictable and rapid recovery, minimizing system downtime, business disruption, and lost revenue. Zerto, an HPE company, speeds up the process of recovering your data and applications, at scale. Zerto’s CDP technology enables recovery in minutes and enables your organization to recover from an interruption or failure with the lowest RPOs and fastest RTOs in the industry.

6. Add air-gapped data protection

An air gap, also known as an “air wall,” is a security measure that protects data against intrusion. The concept is simple: any device that is not connect to a network cannot be attacked remotely. One of the challenges with on-premises data protection solutions is that they are exposed to the same ransomware threat as the rest of your data center. Any backup environment connected to your network can be infected by the same ransomware. Which has corrupted your main database, preventing you from accessing your backup data at critical times.

You can avoid this cyber trap with empty tape backup solutions. Storing offline and offsite copies of data on tape storage without connectivity to public networks ensures that ransomware cannot interfere with a backup. Regularly create secondary backup copies to tape to ensure you always have a clean copy of your data.

7.  Set up on-demand sandboxes and anomaly detection

Recovering data safely from a ransomware attack requires more than just recovery. And this involves checking and separating the data for verification before reproducing. There are a number of anomalies in a data center that can be monitored, and a few combinations that can be good indicators of active ransomware. This is where HPE InfoSight really shines and can give you the detailed information you need to make business decisions. Systems need to be harden by updating with the latest patches to prevent ransomware attacks. And also it is important to look for malware before an attack occurs. and It takes several days before attackers decide to activate the malware. Or ransomware attacks on the system for weeks to months. They often target known insecurities.

Zerto allows you to build an on-demand sandbox replica of your production environment quickly and without disruption. Being able to quickly and uninterruptedly test security patches and scan for malware in on-demand sandboxes helps you accelerate preventative measures to protect your systems against ransomware. Sandboxes and anomaly detection can work together to provide an additional layer of protection against cyber threats and modern disasters.

Get back in control

By implementing these steps, you can begin to protect your organization’s data against damaging ransomware attacks. but when you have control over your business data and, letter you are not immune to hacker requests. Dangerous landscapes are evolving. More businesses need to protect their data from any cyber-attacks. Their data protection from edge to the cloud needs to be modernize. Modernization of data protection gives you control. The cost of a backup environment can only improve performance by minimizing risk and complexity. Protecting your data on the edge, on-premises, and in the cloud allows you to meet future SLAs. You will be able to meet the demand SLAs (RPO and RTO) and move your business forward.