We have seen a sudden increase in number of Ransomware attacks worldwide and COVID-19 seems to be the reason behind this. As the pandemic took hold, many organizations were forced to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives. Organizations implemented new collaboration and communication platforms to enable employees, suppliers and customer to interact in remote-working environments. In doing so, enterprises struggled to ensure that IT security measures keep up with this rapid change and attackers seem to have taken full advantage of this situation.
Given the current situation and future dependence on technology, it is imperative for organizations to have a robust IT resiliency plan to overcome a ransomware attack. It is predicted that by 2021, an organisation will be subject to a ransomware attack every 11 seconds. This means no organization is immune to a potential attack and an encounter with a ransomware is inevitable. While working towards reducing the number of such encounters, organizations should simultaneously focus more on recovery.
We spoke to CIOs and CISOs of different organizations and found that many had suffered a ransomware attack, while others confessed that their company would struggle to bounce back. Almost 30% of respondents said it would take almost 1 weeks’ time to fully recover, means many may decide to pay as every minute of business downtime is precious. Despite paying the ransom, organizations are not guaranteed to get their data back, because the attacker may not be able to decrypt it. Losing your organization data can be disastrous and could harm your organization in many ways. Fortunately, you can take steps to recover it.
The best approach to recover from a ransomware attack is to make your organization as resilient as possible against ransomware. This can be achieved by effectively storing and backing up your data. Here are few steps to help your organization achieve this:
- You can keep multiple copies of your data and store them in different locations. This will reduce the chances of an attacker gaining access to all your data.
- Try to store your data in encrypted from as this will make an attacker’s job difficult. It would be difficult for an attacker to find out what kind of data you have stored. Even if an attacker gains access to your data this will not be of any use to him.
- Increase frequency of your data backup. This will shorten your recovery point objective by running backups more often and shrink your recovery time to hours or even minutes.
- Phishing incidents are the most common entry methods for ransomware. Organization can reduce this by limited access to backups.
- A good-looking DR plan on paper may fail during a real disaster. Hence, testing your DR plan frequently is a good idea to check your resiliency level.
Ransomwares are there to stay with us and we can never say that we have immunity against ransomware. You have to be continuously vigilant by ensuring your data is backed up and kept out of reach of attackers. This will help you achieve greater resiliency against ransomware.
