Following Cisco’s 2016 Midyear Cybersecurity Report shining a spotlight on ransomware and drawing attention to the importance of improving ransomware detection or “Time to Detect (TTD)”, Andrew Stuart MD EMEA at Datto Inc commented below.
Andrew Stuart, MD EMEA at Datto Inc:
The presence of ransomware on a system can cause significant downtime, which can incur massive losses; companies still need to pay staff wages and keep the lights on. Downtime can also cause inestimable damage to a company’s brand and reputation. In addition, 41% of organisations end up paying the criminals, further fuelling this crimewave.
Once you’re infected with ransomware there are usually only two options – abandon your data, or pay up. However, with Datto, there’s a third option – restore from your cloud backup and continue your business without interruption. It’s vital for businesses of every size to review their data backup procedures to ensure that they can restore their data smoothly in the event of a ransomware incident.
Preventative measures such as scanning your machines regularly with reputable AV software, not opening unknown attachments, and backing up your computer regularly should be taken, but there is no sure fire way of preventing ransomware.
In a recent survey conducted by Datto EMEA, 91% of IT Solution providers said ransomware-infected customers actually had Anti-Virus software in place. However, 97% of malware today can morph to become unique to each endpoint device, making traditional signature-based security now virtually useless.
Anti-Virus and ‘best practices’ can only do so much in the face of this onslaught, so it’s worth considering cloud-to-cloud backup to defend against ransomware and for your own peace of mind. Secure cloud-to-cloud backup solutions create another encrypted version of your data and maintain prior versions – in the case of a ransomware attack, the versions before the attack. And of course this second copy has the added benefit of preventing data loss via accidental deletion.”
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