Immutable backups are the best defense against ransomware

What do Marks & Spencer, a 2,000 - doctor hospital in Ohio and a major Japanese freight firm have in common?

Since you’re reading the SpaceTime blog, you can probably venture a guess: they’re each among the victims of ransomware attacks within the last month.

Ransomware accounted for more than $3 billion in damages last year alone, according to Kaspersky. It can affect any and every organisation on the planet - from schools to retailers and, most worryingly, healthcare companies. Hospitals and other care facilities are frequent targets as they’re seen as not only having weak security, but a pressing need to pay up to prevent disruption to their services.

Kettering Health, for example - the Ohio-based hospital referenced earlier - suffered a system-wide outage in May after hackers made their way into its network. That impacted its 14 facilities across the state, call centres and more. It isn’t clear what the ransom demand was and whether it was paid - these matters are usually kept out of the public record - but it left the organisation needing to cancel procedures and scrambling to resume normal operations.

Also in May, attackers knocked the M&S website offline after tampering with its systems. The attack is forecast to impact the retailer’s online sales, a crucial part of the business, for a number of weeks. Over in Japan, air and sea cargo handler Kintetsu World Express had its systems disrupted by hackers for a second time in a year. The attack affected its business in many of the 30 markets that it operates in.

Payday coming up!

Ransomware can be an effective way for hackers to score a payday with as many as 16% of organisations deciding to pay up to get their data back and systems online, according to one report. It’s little wonder that the number of attacks has risen significantly in recent years, as data from Symantec shows.

Preventing attacks is an ongoing challenge, especially as both technology and attacker tactics evolve, plus the primary targets are often employees, who are lured with increasingly sophisticated social engineering attacks. To mitigate the impact, though, companies can work on defending their data with a robust backup strategy.

Criminals love targeting backups - secure them with immutability

That may sound obvious, but we’ve heard anecdotal stories of companies failing to initiate their backup or even storing it incorrectly - alongside their primary data. In the case of the latter, if that server is compromised, corrupted or deleted, the backup is lost, too.\

Even when a backup is properly configured, attackers will go after it in the knowledge that getting hold of it makes the target company more likely to pay them.

That’s where immutable backups come in - they can’t be modified, deleted, or encrypted by anyone. With at least one tamper - proof copy, organisations can be confident in their ability to recover from attacks.

That’s essential if you want to continue your business operations without disruption. Whether that be serving patients, selling to customers online or moving goods around the world. Robust backup is the foundation for resilience in the age of ransomware.

Ultimately, security should be a way of life for businesses, not just a feature.\