The availability of recent and quickly-deployed backups is vital to an organisation's recovery from a cyber attack, said experts at the VeeamON 2015 data centre availability conference in Las Vegas yesterday.
A to-the-minute backup that allows an organisation to select applications and files at individual item level for speedy restoration can allow an organisation to recover from an encryption-based cyber attack quickly, easily and relatively unscathed, said Bob Eadie, computer systems manager at Bedford School, England.
Up-to-date backups become more important the larger an organisation gets, said John Metzger, senior director of product marketing at Veeam. While a backup a few hours old can help a small business get back on its feet, this amount of time represents a huge loss for a larger business, he explained.
Low recovery time can also mitigate the effects of an attack by limiting downtime to minutes, said Rick Vanover, senior manager of product strategy at Veeam. It is now possible to restore an entire virtual machine in under 15 minutes, Vanover said. Yet 92% of virtual machine recoveries take longer than 15 minutes, he added, citing an ESG BC/DR survey published in October 2015.
Yet backups can also be compromised, warned Vanover. To safeguard themselves against this risk, businesses should observe the "3-2-1 rule": keeping three different copies of their data, in two different types of media, one of which must be off-site, he advised.
To protect backups against being compromised by hackers or malware, they should be protected by specific permissions settings that are not tied to any particular users, said Eadie.
Ransomware runs rampant
Ransomware is an escalating threat to businesses because it is increasingly easy to access and deploy, said Andrew Buel, FBI special agent. Development kits for ransomware are easily available online, he noted.
This kind of malware is most commonly deployed by e-mailing an employee a disguised malicious link, which, when clicked, infects the business with malware that encrypts the company's assets as far as the targeted employee's permissions will allow it, Buel explained.
For this reason, regular permission auditing to axe unnecessary permissions is an important security activity, said Buel.
While popular cloud software such as Google Drive allows users to efficiently work across various devices and environments, these file-sharing and cloud backup features can also present an easy pathway for malware to spread, added Eadie.
Furthermore, anti-virus software is not always efficient in detecting the presence of ransomware, he warned.
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