Call for Backup in the Fight Against Ransomware

July 18th, 2016 by Sam Cobley

In recent years cyber-thieves have adopted ransomware in alarming numbers and experts have now catalogued more than 120 separate families of ransomware.

You will be hard pressed to find an IT or Security Manager that doesn’t know a business that’s been hit with ransomware.

Obviously the best way to protect against a virus is to have defences to ensure you never receive any viruses in the first place, but with so many strains and so much effort behind ransomware attacks it’s not a matter of if your business will be hit by ransomware, but when.

This is why we are advising our customers that ultimately the best defence is reliable and regular backups. That way if your files are encrypted you can quickly recover them without paying a hefty ransom to the criminals.

Andy Grover, Technical Director at BrightCloud says “having a good backup policy is the most reliable method for recovering infected systems and defeating ransomware”.

Implement backup retention policies

Having a backup alone isn’t enough, you need to make sure you have implemented retention policies. Otherwise you may come to restore files and find your backups have been overwritten with the encrypted or corrupted data. So the importance of having known-good tested backups with sufficient retention points or generations to cope with a malware infection that may not be noticed immediately cannot be overstated.

Minimise downtime

It’s all well and good having comprehensive backups with plenty of retention points but if it takes you 48 hours to recover files, they aren’t all that useful. Many business simply cannot afford extended downtime so the amount of time taken to recover your files is also crucial.

Test your backups

Finally it is also important that you test your backups on a regular basis, so that in the event of an attack you know they are going to work.

“Once your backups are done and stored securely you need to know that you can recover from them.”

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