What is the Role of Azure Backup in Ransomware Protection and Recovery?
Have you been the victim of a Ransomware Attack? Are you worried about Ransomware and how to defend against it?
Ransomware is still the most common cyber threat for organizations and thousands of ransomware attacks occur every day. Malwares attacks a business by scanning for data on the network, encrypting it, and demanding a bitcoin ransom to decrypt the data, is becoming more common these days. Ransoms are increasing, and terms such as ransomware-as-a-service have been coined to describe these professional attacks that are orchestrated by criminal organizations. The success of these forms of attacks has inspired other attackers and even kits are available to build your own ransomware!
It’s no secret that ransomware attacks are increasing. In fact, a business is hit with ransomware every 40 seconds. If ransomware does get a hold of your data, you can pay a large amount of money hoping that you will get your data back. The alternative is to not pay anything and begin your recovery process. Whether you pay the ransom or not, your enterprise loses time and resources dealing with the aftermath.
Data is the currency of the Digital World. Are you protecting it?
The backup isn’t isolated from the production data
There aren’t any controls that require authentication before destructive operations and ransomware can wipe your data
There are no alert mechanisms to inform the system administrator of critical operations
If any of these are true for your organization, then you need to rethink your Backup practices.
There are effective ways to protect your backups from being affected. Most important among them is to move your backups offsite. This is to isolate the Data from its backup, protecting it from malware. Traditional security measures like encryption is also very effective. Authentication controls like Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) and role–based access, can also prevent hackers from messing with your backups. Finally, alerting administrators in real-time and delaying final delete can allow you to quickly respond to suspicious activity.
Microsoft’s Azure Backup already includes these capabilities. Azure Backup stores the backups in a cloud storage account separate from the customer’s subscription. It requires two-factor authentication before critical operations are executed. AES 256 encryption is used when sending the backup to the cloud. In addition to traditional alerting and role-based access capabilities, Azure Backup even retains the backups for 14 days after deletion.
What if the attacker also prevented access to your backup? Maybe they deleted your backups? Azure Backup has implemented new security mechanisms to protect your backup data from these deliberate kinds of attacks.
Microsoft’s cloud backup solution, Azure Backup, has added new protections to defend your data against deliberate attacks.
Azure Backup Security Features
Retention of deleted data:
Your data will be retained by the recovery services vault for 14 days after you delete it. This means that even if some ransomware manages to delete your backups, you can still restore your data.
Minimum retention range checks:
Maybe you need to go further back in time to before the infection. This feature ensures that you can restore from more than just 1 recovery point.
Alerts and notifications:
You will be alerted in the event of a backup schedule being stopped or backup data being deleted. You’ll know that an attack is underway if no human initiated this action.
Multiple layers of security:
You require a PIN to be entered to perform certain actions. For example, if I attempt to stop a scheduled backup and delete all the data from a MARS agent, I will be prompted to enter the PIN.
With Azure Backup, we are changing the ransomware story. You, not ransomware, are in control of your data.
Azure Backup gives you 3 ways you can proactively protect your data in Azure and on-premises from ransomware.
The first step is to back up your data. You need to back up virtual machines running in Azure and on-premises virtual machines, physical services, and files to Azure. If your on-premises data is compromised, you’ll have several copies of your data in Azure. This gives you the flexibly to restore your data back to a specific period in time and keep your business moving forward.
Next, you can set up a six-digit PIN directly from the Azure portal as an additional layer of protection for your Azure Backups. Only users with valid Azure credentials can then create and receive this security PIN required to be entered before any backup operation is performed.
Finally, Azure Backup provides just-in-time notifications to alert you to potential ransomware attacks. If a suspicious activity is attempted with your backups, a notification is immediately sent to you to get involved before ransomware has the chance.
Your backups need to be protected from sophisticated malware attacks. Permanent loss of data can have significant cost and time implications to your business. To help protect against this, Azure Backup guards against malicious attacks through deeper security, faster notifications, and extended recoverability. It is essential for organizations to have a backup of critical business data in case defenses fail during a ransomware attack
Azure Backup is highly equipped to protect businesses on-premise and cloud-backups from these malicious ransomware attacks.
Knowing that bot and malware attacks can leave your business spending time and money on the permanent data lost, Azure Backup gives your business the confidence that your data is being highly secured by providing faster notifications, a more in-depth security scan, and extended recoverability.
The Cyber Security landscape gets more treacherous every day. you can be confident that Azure Backup will always be given the capabilities to preserve and protect your data. To deploy an Azure cloud solution or better understand your organization’s cyber-vulnerabilities,
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