No such thing as 100% effective ransomware protection

Research suggests 77% of companies infected with ransomware are running up-to-date endpoint protection.

Malware is continually evolving, and anti-malware software is struggling to keep up. Once an infection has occurred, removing the ransomware is highly unlikely.

Paying up doesn’t guarantee getting your data back

Not all ransomware behaves as expected. The decryption might fail, or a second higher ransom fee could be demanded. Besides, there is nothing to stop cyber-attackers targeting your organisation again if you confirm willingness to pay a ransom.

Adopt a recovery-first approach

Data recovery should be at the forefront of your defence plan. You need to ensure you create isolated backups that are kept separate from the live environment, in an offsite location, preferably in a cloud service designed for this purpose, as ransomware actively targets backups on the same network to increase the likelihood of payment.

Ensure adequate retention

You should ensure that your backup service is capable of storing many retention points or versions of your data. Otherwise, you run the risk of not having a recovery point before the infection occurred. This happens often when businesses rely on sync and share services for backup rather than having a dedicated, isolated backup solution in place. Ransomware often sits dormant on a network for 180 days before executing to ensure its present in al retention points.

Test everything regularly

Ensure you can restore from backups frequently. Most businesses have backup in place and a DR plan but many fail to test their Disaster Recovery plan in advance. Invoking Disaster Recovery even as a test can cause disruption and involves time and planning. Redstor’s InstantData technology enables you to instantly verify your backup data can be streamed on demand in the event of an issue, perfect for testing.

Cloud-based backup - the best last defence

Redstor enables you to recover all data and systems to a state before a ransomware infection took hold. This negates the effects of ransomware, avoids the need to pay a ransom and allows you to recover from an attack without having to invoke a full disaster recovery scenario. Our cloud technology encrypts data before it leaves your devices and data remains encrypted at all times on our platform, ensuring ransomware can’t execute.

There’s no hardware required and with a simple intuitive installation process, your business’ data could be protected in minutes.