Strategies for Dealing With Ransomware Risk

Cybersecurity issues continue to dominate the headlines, from increases in ransomware attacks to consistent data breaches stemming from mismanaged, stolen, or compromised accounts. Malware attacks are a growing problem for organizations of all sizes and the "bad guys" are turning ransomware into a lucrative enterprise as the impact to businesses can be devastating. Targeted organizations often believe that paying the ransom is the most cost-effective way to get their data back — and, unfortunately, this may be the reality because they were not prepared.

An organization’s backup process is one of the most critical components of their overall data protection strategy and a mainframe virtual tape system that has the right feature set can provide an effective layer of protection. Optica’s zVT mainframe virtual tape systems offer the features and tools required to defend against today’s sophisticated data breach and malware threats.

In many cases a ransomware attack can be intentionally delayed by the perpetrators in order to infect many months of backup tapes, ensuring the company cannot restore the infected systems from recent backup tapes. Often it can take weeks or months for companies to recognize that they were even hacked. During that time, uninfected server backups are overwritten with the malware or ransomware and after a predetermined period, the hacker triggers the ransomware, shutting down all employee access to critical data, and the organization has no way to recover.

Based on this reality, the only way to beat a ransomware attack is to regularly generate a series of backups (before infection) that are completely protected and isolated, so that they remain uninfected and available for use when needed. An effective detection and recovery process relies heavily on the proper retention policies, virtual tape architecture and key features from the mainframe virtual tape system.