The rise of double extortion ransomware
We've become familiar with the widespread use of ransomware, but researchers at Rapid7 have been examining the rise of a newer phenomenon, 'double extortion'.
Pioneered by the Maze ransomware group, double extortion involves cybercriminals collecting files before encrypting them. Then if the target organization refuses to pay they threaten to release sensitive information.
Just because you have a backup strategy it doesn't mean you can recover data
Almost all (99 percent) of IT decision makers say they have backup strategies in place, but 26 percent admit they were unable to fully restore all data or documents when recovering from a backup.
These findings come from a survey conducted for encrypted USB drive company Apricorn by Vanson Bourne, which also finds that 27 percent have automated backups to both central and personal repositories.
Good backups are critical to recovering from ransomware
A new report from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), sponsored by Keepit, shows that granular and air-gapped backup are critical to data recovery when businesses are hit by ransomware.
Of more than 600 respondents to the survey, 79 percent have experienced a ransomware attack within the last year, with 17 percent experiencing attacks weekly and 13 percent daily.
Pay up or play different? Five tips for beating ransomware with backups
When it comes to ransomware, sometimes the cost of downtime can exceed the cost of paying up. Companies with frozen data and systems face loss of revenue, productivity, customer departures, damaged reputations, never mind the cost of the ransom itself. Take an organization like Colonial Pipeline, which should have had healthy backups in place to quickly recover from their attack and most likely did. However, they opted to shell out $4.4 million in ransom because they didn’t know how long it would take to get up and running again.
And according to ITIC's 2021 Hourly Cost of Downtime survey, one hour of a server being inoperable costs $300,000 or more for 91 percent percent of mid-sized and large enterprises.
World Backup Day highlights the importance of keeping your data safe
Today is World Backup Day, which is a good opportunity to remind you that you only have a couple of days left to get your hands on some free backup software courtesy of our AOMEI giveaway.
It's also an opportunity to look at the continued importance of backups even in the modern world of clouds and SaaS applications. A new report from Crucial highlights the ongoing cost of data breaches which has risen 9.8 percent from 2020 to 2021.
Ransomware: Even backups may not save you
When the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack became public in the first half of 2021, many were surprised that the company paid a $4.4 million ransom to recover its business systems. After all, it’s unthinkable that a company so large wouldn’t have backups in place. According to an article in the Wall Street Journal, however, Colonial’s CEO "authorized the ransom payment of $4.4 million because executives were unsure how badly the cyberattack had breached its systems, and consequently, how long it would take to bring the pipeline back."
Colonial didn’t say much more than this about why they decided to pay the ransom, but, assuming the company had backups systems in place, there are two possible scenarios. The first is that the backups, themselves were hit by the ransomware malware. This seems unlikely, as a large organization like Colonial likely follows the 3-2-1 maxim for backup: three copies of data on two different forms of storage media with one offsite. Certainly, it’s possible that there was still a logical connection between all backups and the production network, which would have allowed the attack to access backups. But typically, offsite backups are well protected against this kind of attack and are often stored in a read-only format that cannot be encrypted or overwritten by malware.
Backups can save your business
Backups are more common than you think. Every day you most likely have a backup in place, whether it be someone who can cover for you to watch your puppy if something interrupts your schedule or even that spare tire that is in your car in case of a flat.
Backup and recovery plans apply to just about everything that you can think of in your daily life. Let’s focus on your business now and look at top reasons why you really need to have a secure and reliable backup solution.
Businesses need to focus on the basics to defend against ransomware
A new whitepaper released today by O'Reilly and based on a survey of tech professionals experiences of ransomware concludes that basic security practices like backups are key to surviving an attack.
Of 950 respondents to the study only six percent had experienced a ransomware attack directly in the organization they work for and, by and large, these organizations have strong security measures in place.
New software improves ransomware resilience and recovery
Ransomware attacks are growing in severity and volume, bringing increasing costs and financial, legal, and other challenges.
Businesses need to be sure they can recover from an attack and data management specialist Zerto aims to provide the means with its latest offering Zerto 9.
What is your backup solution now?
For a while backup solutions were a dominant topic in the tech sphere. That was in the days when external drive sizes were growing rapidly and the cloud was becoming a thing. It seems the services have now become established and the frail weeded out. Most storage drives today are larger than most people need.
If you’ve been around a while, as I have, you’ll remember when ZIP Drives -- like oversize floppy drives -- were the hot new backup product. Like all the "latest things", people invested a lot of money in that solution but it was short-lived.
Backup4all 9.0 Professional allows users to create a fail-safe backup of their cloud storage
European developer Softland has released Backup4all 9.0, a major new version of its commercial backup tool for Windows PCs.
The update follows two months after Softland updated its free backup tool in the form of FBackup 9.0 with, among other things, support for backing up files from Dropbox and Google Drive and the ability to track the time estimated for downloading or uploading files to and from the cloud during backup jobs. Users also gained the ability to combine multiple sources in a single backup job.
Modernizing data protection becomes a top priority for enterprises
A new study carried out by IDC for cloud data management company Zerto reveals that modernizing data protection, including backup and disaster recovery, is an IT priority that is crucial to digital transformation for 90.8 percent of respondents.
It also shows that 94.7 percent have seen an impact to their work-from-home data protection as a result of COVID, and that 80 percent of new applications will be deployed in the cloud or at the edge.
Why senior management needs to make cloud backup a priority
At work and at home, backup is critical. From making photocopies of significant documents to digitizing old family photos, relying on hard drives to replicating servers, we all know that it’s important to have multiple copies of the information that matters to our families and our businesses. Knowing we should do something, however, isn’t the same as doing it consistently and well -- which is why backup often fails.
Many organizations still rely on outdated backup strategies that put the company at risk from cybercrime, human error, physical disasters and more. But because the business "already has a backup plan", or because backup isn’t a shiny new object, it can be difficult to convince senior management to make it a priority.
Don't be fooled into not backing up your data!
We celebrated World Backup Day last month. Started in 2011 by digital consultant Ismail Jadun it is observed on March 31st every year -- a date chosen because it’s the day before April Fools Day… and of course you’d have to be a fool not to backup your data!
This especially recognized day is a strong reminder of the increasing role data plays in our lives and of how critical it is to backup all of your data. Regardless of the size of your organization, it’s likely that data is an essential aspect of running it. If you don’t yet have a solid plan to keep your data safe, there are four things you should consider:
Make a huge saving on O&O DiskImage 16 Professional for World Backup Day
Today, March 31, is World Backup Day. It's the day of the year when those people who do remember to back up their data on a regular basis get to feel a little smug about things, and those of us who don't do so get to feel a bit guilty. But instead of feeling bad about not backing up your important files, why not make this the year that you take the World Backup Day Pledge?
The pledge reads: "I solemnly swear to backup my important documents and precious memories on March 31st". And to make it easier for you to stick to this pledge, we have an amazing special offer for you -- for a very limited period you can make a big saving on the hugely respected backup tool O&O DiskImage 16 Professional.
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