Data resiliency in the face of ransomware

Businesses with an online presence have to deal with the constant threat of cyber attacks, and ransomware stands out as one of the most disruptive threats a company can face.

The malware costs an average of $4 million to remedy, and while it can be detected or tackled with the right tools and backups, neither are silver bullets.

Cyber criminals want to get at sensitive data, and they’re ramping up their efforts. Check Point Research has found that weekly cyber attacks reached a two-year high last quarter at an average of 1,258 attacks per organization, per week.

In this episode, Rory and Jane are joined by Denis Kennelly, general manager of IBM storage, to unravel the importance of a proper cyber resilience strategy, data backups, and tackling ransomware head-on.

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Highlights

“The key point I want to make is, you’ve really got to start thinking about that business risk in a more a planned way. To really think about, “what am I going to do in each of those phases?” Because it comes back to the point I am saying: hope is not a method. Hoping the breach won't happen is one approach, right, but it's not a very good approach.”

“You’ve got to think that what you're dealing with here is engineered for maximum impact, you really can’t trust any data set anywhere, right? Because the chances of it being infected are  extremely high. And in fact, I think in this another IDC stat, in terms of backup corruption 17% of ransomware attacks actually corrupt the backup itself.”

“Traditionally, we all assume once you have a backup it’s good. In the current climate, you can’tt assume that at all, so you have to make sure everything is 100% scanned for ransomware infection. And then as you start to recover, you have to make sure you have a what I call a virtual cleanroom environment for everything that you're recovering back into including things like network connections.”

Footnotes

• What is ransomware?
• What is cloud ransomware and how can you avoid attacks?
• Weekly cyber attacks reach two-year high amid ransomware resurgence
• Ransomware profits reach "staggering" levels as businesses fail to implement MFA properly
• The rise of double extortion ransomware
• Business email compromise attack costs far exceeding ransomware losses
• Cyber attacks on UK organisations surged 77% in 2022, new research finds

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