Protecting your company’s crown jewels: Building cloud-based backup and DR into ransomware defence

It’s a sad fact of life that whenever someone owns anything of value, there’s someone else out there who wants to get their hands on it illegally. Today’s corporate crown jewels are the critical data on which organisations depend and the highwaymen are cybercriminals, who have built a lucrative industry from ransomware attacks that disrupt businesses, steal data and aim to extract payment from their victims.

Tackling this scourge is a critical challenge for IT managers on several levels, but when it comes to the crunch, putting solid cloud backup and disaster recovery (DR) plans in place can help businesses keep hold of the aces and hang on to their crown jewels. Recent figures show that, after a slight lull towards the end of 2017, ransomware attacks have once again accelerated in the first half of 2018, reaching a reported 181.5 million incidents. This rise has been driven by the emergence of ransomware-as-a-service, which now means that almost zero technical expertise is needed to perpetrate an attack – just a target and a willing ransomware provider.

As well as increasing in volume, attacks are also evolving to become more sophisticated, seeking out and encrypting remote network drives and servers and hunting down and removing shadow copies and backup files. The rationale behind this evolution is simple: to lock down the victim’s recovery options and increase the chances of a ransom being paid.