Defeating Ransomware with Zero Day Recovery

Data is the most valuable asset a business owns; whether intellectual property, personal details or management information. It is a target for malicious activity. For this reason, it’s clear that the core focus area for most organisations is defending and protecting against cyber threats to keep their data and reputation safe from harm.

As software continues to become more complex, and software developers face increasing pressure to release products faster, security vulnerabilities in software are becoming much more common. These vulnerabilities are exploited by hackers through ‘zero-day attacks’ or unknown attacks.

It is these attacks that create a ‘window of vulnerability’ where an organisation’s systems are left unprotected; awaiting the release of a new patch or signature to defend against the threat.

Understanding a Zero-Day Attack

Zero-day attacks are almost impossible to detect and destroy as they use routes that are previously unknown and often get through existing defences. According to analyst reports, the threat of ransomware using zero-day methods is rising from one per week in 2015, to one per day by 2021.

How do you Defend Against the Unknown?

This is where Data Recovery comes in.

The cyber security industry is doing its best to defend against zero-day attacks and windows of vulnerability, but’s it’s no easy feat. Most cyber teams concentrate on defending against the attack and don’t have the resources to create a data recovery plan that insures against the threat.

It is often left to internal IT teams to restore and recover systems using backups in the aftermath of an attack. In the case of ransomware that means either paying the ransom to restore the system or hoping that your backup is not affected and restoring from there.

Following a window of vulnerability or ransomware attack, it’s critical for an organisation to recover as fast as possible. The less time systems are offline, the better; as disrupting your business inevitably costs money e.g. loss of revenue, loss of employee productivity and loss of customer trust.

In practice, backups may not always be successful. If the backup copy was on the same network as the main infrastructure, chances are the data was compromised in the ransomware attack. Plus, there’s the time it takes to restore files to consider. Very often organisations backup everything in one place, without considering what is core or critical to the operation of the business.

This leads to major issues if entire business IT operations are disrupted simultaneously and could cause organisations to be offline for days, in severe cases even weeks, which is extremely damaging to your reputation.

Zero Day Recovery^TM Service

There is another solution. You need to focus on your ability to recover your critical data and systems fast. By assessing what is critical, and ensuring that this is backed up properly. If you then add in the ability for quick recovery whilst ensuring your systems are immutable and safe from the attack; then ransomware attacks are much less of a problem for you. In fact, you could say they were defeated.

At CSI we know how to define policies and outcomes that work best for your business. With our Zero Day Recovery^TM service, we are your last line of defence against zero-day and ransomware attacks.

Contact us to request a free maturity assessment and we will provide you with a report on your data protection and recovery maturity, including recommendations on improvements for best practice… Check if we offer this?

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To learn more about our offering visit our Data protection pages here: https://www.csiltd.co.uk/our-capabilities/data/enhanced-data-protection/