The concept of permanence and integrity has been instituted for a long time because humans desire that their data be placed in stone.
But today, the most valuable information is much more abstract.
As digital data has increasingly become the lifeblood of business, government, and personal virtual lives, securing your data, keeping backups updated, and ready for quick restoration is more important than ever.
Ransomware attacks are increasingly prevalent, causing mission-critical systems to come crashing down unexpectedly - with demanding payment for recovery.
It provides companies and IT professionals a buffer to defend against the inevitable.
However, backing up your data might not protect you from cyber-attacks.
Ransomware attacks at enterprise and government levels compromised entire backups. Immutable backups are not new.
Ensuring data is write-protected has been around since the tape media days.
What is meant by immutable backup?
One of the frequently asked questions is what are immutable backups?
Immutable backups are a type of data protection that prevents any change, deletion, or alteration in the backed-up data for x number of days.
This way, if the primary data gets compromised or even encrypted by ransomware, these unchanged backup copies—immutable data—can be directly restored to prevent any form of actual loss and contentious ransoms.
There are multiple ways to make backups immutable. Some include using write-once-read-many (WORM) storage technology, cryptographic solutions, and backup tools with integrated immutability capabilities.
The idea is to forge an immutable link between backup data and a process.
Why you should backup immutable?
Not all backups are equal. You can invest in encrypted, off-site, and replications, but using those different types is safe, as every investment business wants to be at the forefront.
However, more is needed if the backup server can also be compromised, allowing hackers to encrypt or edit your data.
Never allow data to be modified or deleted in any way; otherwise, your only hope of protecting that data is gone. Therefore, we must create immutable backups.
The whole point of immutability is that even when a hacker has taken over your environment and gets full admin access to the server where backup files are stored, hacker should not have the chance to modify, delete, or encrypt any backup file.
Currently, when ransomware strikes you and locks your files away and loses access to the servers, this can enable you to spin up a new server and restore all of it.
How can you guarantee your backup data is secure?
While your primary storage systems should be open and available to client and employee systems, backup data must maintain isolation and immutability.
It is often also one of the faster ways to get your production systems up and running after they have been breached.
Protecting data should be considered more than sophisticated file permissions, folder ACLs, and storage protocols.
None of these protocols are perfectly secure, and a malicious actor can use them to encrypt your files with ransomware or delete them.
An immutable backup built-in provides guaranteed ransomware recovery.
It is clean as you store your data, so after the malware gets cleaned up and eliminated, a fresh copy of this same can again be restored from any point.
In this way, your data will be restored after a ransomware attack, and the downtime or redemption payment is avoided.
Preserving an immutable backup further enables your organization to comply with regulatory data compliance and security requirements and ensures that accurate data copies remain intact.
5 ways to safeguard data from ransomware
Protecting data from ransomware necessitates a multifaceted approach that includes preventive and proactive tactics.
Here are some strategies for increasing resilience to ransomware attacks:
1. Prevent access to backups
Restricting access to backup systems and data is vital to preventing ransomware from infecting these critical assets.
Backup infrastructure should only be accessible to authorized workers, and access privileges should be evaluated and updated regularly by job duties and responsibilities.
Implement robust authentication techniques, such as multi-factor authentication (MFA), to provide an extra layer of security for backup systems.
2. Time interval for backing up data
Recurrent and timely backups are required to reduce the potential data loss due to ransomware.
For this reason, it is imperative to establish a proper ransomware backup interval according to the severity of the data and the degree of change in your files.
Use more frequent backups for highly critical data to narrow the potential window of lost data.
3. Test disaster recovery regularly
The critical component of recovering successfully from a ransomware attack is a well-rounded disaster recovery plan, which must be tested frequently.
The plan needs to establish procedures for responding quickly when a ransomware attack is detected and contain the spread of damage, building upon playbooks that detail how attackers will act.
By testing your plans and simulating different scenarios that a ransomware attack could be, you'll ensure all this effort has the desired effects.
4. Store your backups to different sites
Keeping backups in multiple different geographies is another additional dimension to prevent ransomware.
Having them at a separate location when the ransomware infects one spot can be used for data availability and recovery.
Second, you should have geo-diverse backups so that your primary backup is just across the street in a physically separate data center to avoid resiliency failure when disaster strikes.
Use one or more cloud storage services as a secondary backup destination to improve your data resiliency strategy.
5. Use air gap backups and immutable storage
They are advanced methods that provide sophisticated protection against ransomware attacks. An example of this is the air gap backup.
This method physically or logically separates it from the primary network and completely disconnects it from all connections until needed for data recovery.
This isolation ensures that ransomware cannot get at the backup data, and it is virtually immune to ransomware storage; on the other hand, it does not allow data to be modified or deleted for a particular period of time.
Even if it can break through the primary data, ransomware cannot change or encrypt immutable backup copies. This ensures that corrupt versions of the data are loaded for recovery.
Adding air gap backups and using immutable storage technology can prevent ransomware attacks from destroying all your data in a worst-case scenario, which is better than paying the ransom to recover that critical information.
Conclusion
Immutable backups are critical cybersecurity and compliance measures, as they guarantee backups are safe, recoverable, and available.
In addition to having immutable backups, organizations should follow cybersecurity best practices and take safeguards measures, including access control tools, authentication, employee training, encryption, and isolating immutable backups via air gapping.