Best Ransomware Protection For Business

Ransomware Statistics

Consider the following: If you believe ransomware operates in the same way as other types of intrusions, you may be skipping crucial measures in protecting yourself against it. This article provides an overview of defending yourself against ransomware threats, including an assessment of the present state of ransomware threats, a discussion of the most recent innovations in ransomware design, and the creation of a ransomware backup strategy, among other things.

Types of Ransomware

By the end of 2019, ransomware attacks have caused widespread disruptions across a wide range of industries and sectors. Every six months, between 900,000 and 1,200,000 users are believed to be attacked by ransomware, according to industry estimates.

Because of the increase in the number of ransomware variants, managed service providers (MSPs) must be prepared to identify between them and protect against them.
Ransomware comes in a variety of forms.
We will describe the most recent modes of attack that ransomware programmes employ to corrupt systems and data in the sections that follow. This is not a comprehensive list of ransomware attack types, but rather a snapshot of the most recent advancements in ransomware development. You might also wish to look at our guide on ransomware attack scenarios for more information.

Polymorphic Ransomware

A polymorphic ransomware programme is programmed to change its behaviour regularly. In other words, it manifests itself in a variety of ways.
The fact that polymorphic ransomware evolves regularly makes it difficult to identify using the pattern-matching techniques on which antivirus scanners are normally reliant. Because ransomware signatures vary regularly, antivirus tools may have “signatures” that enable them to recognise some forms of the ransomware, but not all of them.

Wiping Ransomware

Wiping ransomware, sometimes known as data wipers, is a type of ransomware that accomplishes exactly what its name implies: it wipes off all of the data on your storage drives by erasing it or otherwise rendering it inaccessible. When attackers wipe data, they often demand a ransom in exchange for the data, which they will have previously-stored up.

Publishing Ransomware (Doxware)

However, rather than erasing data or stopping you from gaining access to it, this type of ransomware copies crucial information and makes it available for everyone to view. The majority of the time, the attackers will demand a ransom before releasing the information. Publishing ransomware (also known as Doxware, because the attacks frequently involve stealing confidential data from Microsoft Word documents) is essentially a form of extortion, according to the FBI.

Time-Bomb Ransomware that includes a time-bomb element is intended to cause the execution of an attack to be delayed. While other ransomware attacks immediately steal, wipe, or extort your data after your computer or server is compromised, time-bomb malware hides on the system and can wait weeks or months before launching its attack.
The most serious threat posed by time-bomb ransomware is that it has the potential to corrupt both backed-up and production data at the same time. If the maximum age of your data backups is smaller than the amount of time that the ransomware waits before launching its attack, you will not have any “clean” copies of your data that you may use to restore your system to a condition where it is not infected with the ransomware.

Time-Bomb

Protect Yourself from Ransomware by Using a Backup Strategy #1: Make regular backups.
In addition to attacking data directly, new strains of ransomware are capable of injecting numerous alterations and encrypting or even deleting data. To mitigate these risks, we recommend developing a ransomware backup strategy and regularly performing backups to ensure that you always have clean copies of your data that you can restore if necessary.

Use Ransomware Backup Strategy to Protect Yourself

#1: Perform backups

In addition, we advocate adopting the 3-2-1 backup strategy. Some ransomware families are expressly designed to attack backup storage systems. In this way, having backups in two locations rather than just one reduces the likelihood of losing your entire dataset in a single disaster.

#2: Use Encryption

Typically, ransomware works by encrypting files with specified extension names and demanding payment. You can encrypt your cloud backup data to encode the contents of a backup set, which will provide an additional degree of protection. This reduces the capacity of ransomware to recognise the backup set as a target, which is a critical step in enabling the malware to erase or encrypt the data on the system.

#3: Establish Retention Policies

Ransomware is a type of malware that encrypts backup data and holds it hostage.
Learn about the most effective methods of protecting data backups from ransomware attacks.
WP icon number three: Create effective Retention Policies.
Defining data retention policies establishes how long backups should be kept if various versions of files should be saved, and when to remove previously-stored information. When it comes to backups of essential data sets, it goes without saying that you must consider how long the data must be available to ensure a thorough recovery.

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#4: Establish Lifecycle Policies

Organizations can store several copies of files that they edit if they use file versioning retention policies to do so. Consequently, they enable the capacity to go back in time to a certain file revision to locate the desired file to be recovered in this manner. You will be able to restore your system to a previous version that was made before the ransomware assault.

Establish policies for the lifecycle of a product or service.
Retention policies are in place to identify which data has to be kept on hand and for how long it should be kept. Assuming, however, that you are utilising a cloud backup solution, the amount of data you preserve can grow to the point where it is no longer cost-effective to keep all of your backups in the type of storage tier that is designed (and priced) to provide high-speed, real-time access to backup sets.

Cloud storage providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) provide numerous tiers of storage that reduce in both speed and price as the storage capacity increases. Cloud backup solutions (such as MSP360 Backup) can take advantage of these multiple tiers of storage. Backup data can be automatically moved to a lower-cost tier if policies are in place to do so after a set length of time. This enables managed service providers (MSPs) to retain backups indefinitely and cost-effectively to safeguard their clients from ransomware.

Conclusion: Backups 1, Ransomware 0

When it comes to being able to protect your data, there is no secret; it is simply a matter of having the data you require available for recovery at the precise moment you require it to be. Because ransomware strains are growing more focused on diminishing your ability to recover, following the four best practices listed above will maximise your chances of recovering.