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Many organizations turn to backups as their primary defense against ransomware. While backup systems are essential, relying on them is a risky strategy.
For example, delivery company CDEK was recently hit by ransomware, causing significant disruptions. Hackers encrypted the company’s servers with ransomware and destroyed all backups.
Learn about the limitations of backup-centric ransomware strategies and how you can protect your organization more effectively with a proactive approach.
Why Ransomware Backup Strategies Often Fail
In theory, backups are designed to help organizations recover after a ransomware attack. By using backups, companies can recover their files and get back to normal. Ideally, this will even mitigate the need to pay the ransom, saving the organization money.
However, this idyllic scenario hardly holds up when facing a real-world attack.
Backups work best under ideal circumstances. In a simple attack, where the organization does everything right and the backup works as designed, the company gets their critical files back in a matter of hours. And they can return to business as usual with hardly any interruption to their business.
But this almost never occurs.
Let’s explore the common reasons why backups won’t save you after a ransomware attack.
Ransomware Threat Actors Target Backups
Backups aren’t a secret weapon. In fact, 93% of ransomware attacks actively target backups.
Threat actors know that backups often contain the information they’re looking to lock down and target them first. If an organization is breached, competent hackers will ensure they can disable or delete any backups before deploying any ransomware.
What’s more, many ransomware threat actors are turning to double extortion and triple extortion ransomware attacks and threatening companies to leak the locked up data if a ransom isn’t paid. Even with backups in place, your confidential data will be made public, leading to reputational damage, compliance issues and lawsuits.
Tip: The right cybersecurity strategy can help you protect your backups from ransomware.
Backups Can Fail
Too often, there are stories of backups simply not working during a ransomware attack, and part of the reason why is largely due to overcomplication and inadvertent negligence. Having a single device backed up is vastly different than having an entire company’s network backed up. Not only are there multiple dependencies and hundreds or thousands of devices to consider, but maintaining regular backups can disrupt business continuity.
This can result in ineffective backups, or backups that aren’t maintained regularly or even tested to ensure they’re working properly. If an organization does get hit with ransomware, they may find that the backup simply doesn’t work or was set up too far back for it to be usable.
Backups Don’t Provide Immediate Recovery
Backups usually cannot be relied upon for immediate recovery. In many cases, the restoration process can take hours or even days, depending on the volume of data and the complexity of the systems involved. This delay can significantly disrupt business activities and impact your Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
Why does it take so long?
All too often, an organization doesn’t know which files have been affected by ransomware, and so they’re not sure which files to restore, either.
They can perform a system-wide restore, but this takes time, and the files may not be up-to-date.
Backups are typically snapshots of data at specific intervals. If these backups are not conducted frequently enough, the most recent data may not be included, which means recent files get lost in the shuffle.
The Need for a Proactive Ransomware Strategy
Backups aren’t useless but shouldn’t be the only line of defense.
If a company can be hit with a ransomware attack, that’s a sign of a vulnerability or exploitation that could lead to other kinds of cyber attacks or another ransomware attack. 78% of companies who are hit with a ransomware attack and pay the ransom are targeted again.
Therefore, it’s essential to invest in technology that detects and removes threats and attacks before they can fully compromise an organization. Companies should look to detection tools that leverage pattern recognition and detection to flag ransomware and remove them immediately from their environment.
By combining backups with ransomware detection and prevention, an organization can build a layered security strategy that’s able to prevent attacks.
Adopt Proactive Ransomware Protection
Don’t rely on backups—take control with CryptoSpike.
With CryptoSpike, you can take a proactive stance against ransomware, building a vital line of defense against attacks.
CryptoSpike detects and blocks ransomware in real time, neutralizing threats before they can encrypt your data, disrupt your business and cause revenue loss.
Protect Your Business with CryptoSpike
Want to see for yourself how CryptoSpike can ramp up your ransomware defenses? Watch the demo and see firsthand how proactive ransomware protection can safeguard your organization’s valuable data.
