The ability to recover from a ransomware attack is as important to your business as building the best protection against it. This is even more so with the number of ransomware attacks on the rise.
‘Ransomware Recovery’
What Is Ransomware?
Ransomware is a type of malicious software that encrypts your files and folders and then demands a ransom to decrypt them. If you don’t pay, the data is deleted, or worse, exfiltrated to the dark web and sold.
Ransomware attacks aren’t isolated to any industry but education, healthcare, and financial institutions are often favorite targets. Any business that uses the internet is a target and susceptible to a ransomware attack.
These attacks are successful because most businesses do not have a proper recovery plan that has been fully fleshed out and practiced. Without a DR plan in place, companies are at the mercy of the criminals. After the attack, they find themselves having to pay the ransom to unlock the system or application, or they’re paying to prevent the exposure of exfiltrated customer data.
Ransomware Recovery Key Features
When LBT assesses your current ransomware recovery position, we consider several different key factors. A few major ones include:
- How quickly can the solution help you get back and running? Or what is the lowest RTO you can achieve?
- How much data will you be able to recover? Or what is the data loss you are going to experience (RPO)?
- Can your solution let you recover your data to an isolated network so that you can perform data sanitization?
- Does the solution have the ability to support multiple copies of the data to allow for flexible recovery options? This is crucial, as is the assurance of an immutable data copy, or data that cannot be modified or deleted.
- Can you perform non disruptive DR testing in the solution so that you can be certain that you can recover when the time comes?
- Does the solution provide on-demand sandbox creation for system hardening and data forensics?
- Does the solution protect all my types of workloads (virtualized, cloud, container, SaaS)?
The responses to these questions help us determine the best suited solutions needed to help us build your ransomware resilience.
What NOT to Do When Planning Ahead of Ransomware
- Don’t think you are too small for ransomware. Hackers like small businesses because they often can’t afford dedicated security resources.
- Don’t stick a piece of software on your system and assume you are safe. Antivirus and anti-malware solutions provide a basic line of defense against incoming threats. They can’t protect against someone accidentally downloading malware.
- Don’t under spend in employee [cyber] training programs that teach them how to recognize and react to cyber attacks, especially phishing emails. According to Cybercrime Magazine, 91% of cyberattacks begin with spear-phishing email.
- Don’t ignore continuous data protection. If you want to have the ability to recover your data at any clear point in time, you need to implement a recovery solution that features CDP at its core, or as a core offering.
- Don’t think that testing your BCDR plan once a year is enough to ensure proper resilience to a ransomware attack.
Cyber Resilience: How to Stay Ahead of the Game
Every cyber security plan should be about preventing ransomware attacks before they happen. However, cyber-attacks and cyber-crimes by their nature are designed to bypass preventative measures and continue to evolve rapidly in order to do so. Organizations that take these threats seriously know that it is a matter of when, not if, they will be attacked.
When that happens, only an effective recovery plan will allow your organization to avoid downtime, business disruption and taking a huge financial hit. The key to ransomware survival, like any disaster, is to prepare ahead of time and plan for specific scenarios. Once you have a plan in place, you need to practice until it becomes second nature, so all the members of the incident response team know their roles, responses, and responsibilities.
When is the best time to prepare for a storm?
Before The Storm Hits
Don't wait until it's too late...
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