Take the Pledge to Prevent a Ransomware Disaster: World Backup Day 2018
It happened again.
This week the city of Atlanta was held hostage by cyberattackers for $51,000 in bitcoin. Residents were unable to pay bills, go online to switch on water services and the municipal courts were closed.
It could have been worse.
Last year, 16 hospitals were shut down in the UK after a ransomware attack resulting in cancelled appointments and non-essential surgeries. That time it was a ransomware strain known as Wanna Decryptor (aka WannaCry).
These attacks are part of a disturbing trend. Last year, 63% of organizations experienced an attempted ransomware attack, with 22% reporting these incidents occurred on a weekly basis (Source: ESG Research).
According to the Symantec Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR) 2018:
- 46% increase in ransomware variants
- 1 in 13 web requests lead to malware (up 3% from 2016)
- 1,242 ransomware detections in 2017 (only slightly down from 2016)
- 80% increase in malware targeting Macs
Sadly, the stats are not expected to improve in 2018. One of the best defenses against ransomware is having a cloud-based backup and restore solution in place for your SaaS applications. But check your solution twice. Some new ransomware variants are designed to reduce the effectiveness of using backups to recover from attacks.
With a trusted and reliable solution like Spanning Backup in place, however, you will be able to recover from ransomware by enabling a restore to the last known good point in time before the ransomware event occurred. Even more importantly, our backups don’t run from a potentially infected host; they pull data directly from the source, where potentially infected files are un-executed. A particular compromised file could be backed up, but there is no execution path for the ransomware to compromise our previous backup data sets.
Easy —from start to finish — so that you can sleep well at night.
Take the Pledge
Friends Don’t Let Friends Go Without a Backup.
While backup is vital every day, use World Backup Day — March 31, 2018 —to urge your colleagues and friends to take the pledge to use a backup solution.
Need help convincing them? Share this blog post and our Preventing a Ransomware Disaster whitepaper. And don’t forget to #BackThatSaaSUp.
Learn the 7 ways organizations lose cloud data
*** This is a Security Bloggers Network syndicated blog from Spanning authored by Heather Malec. Read the original post at: https://spanning.com/blog/take-the-pledge-to-prevent-a-ransomware-disaster-world-backup-day-2018/