Cybersecurity Awareness Month: To Protect Your Data #BeCyberSmart and Focus on Immutability

It’s fitting that Halloween happens during Cybersecurity Month. After all, there’s nothing more terrifying these days for a business than the specter of ransomware attacks. The threat of ransomware is omnipresent, and the tactics deployed by cybercriminals are constantly evolving to wreak as much havoc as possible. When ransomware strikes, it’s not just your data that’s at risk, but your whole business.

In July we saw arguably one of the worst ransomware attacks in history compromise up to 1,500 businesses around the globe. Not only are these attacks worsening, but are becoming more frequent—the FBI received nearly 2,500 ransomware complaints in 2020, an increase of about 20% from 2019. This year is shaping up to be the worst yet, with headlines focused on the recent high-profile attacks and breaches on the likes of Colonial Pipeline and the continued aftermath of SolarWinds. Organizations are struggling to prevent devastating data loss from ransomware attacks, highlighting the vital need for cloud backup to mitigate damage and outages.

As the former CEO of backup company Carbonite, what I’ve seen is that most companies spend far more on intrusion detection and prevention than on protecting their data. But the fact is that most ransomware can’t be stopped by technology solutions because the vulnerabilities are often human (people downloading infected files, being careless with their credentials, falling for phishing scams, and so forth).

If a company has backed up to the cloud, hackers will have to penetrate the cloud service and find a way to erase or encrypt the data. The added bonus of immutability in the cloud prevents any modification or deleting of the protected data for a fixed period of time.

If data storage and cloud backup are implemented into the security plan from the start, a company could easily get rid of ransomware and recover from an attack by wiping its slate clean and restoring its data with little to no downtime. But it’s a time-consuming, technical process, and as such should be a response that IT teams practice and prepare for, just as they would for an application outage or maintenance issue.

That’s why rather than obsessing over the latest firewall technology or intrusion detection software, it’s often better just to have everything fully backed up so that in the event of a ransomware attack, a company can simply wipe everything and begin the restoration process to minimize downtime. A robust data protection strategy with immutability and cloud backup can be the difference between business as usual and all operations grinding to a halt.

Luckily, using Object Lock with Wasabi is a great way to mitigate these cybersecurity threats. Object Lock is a data protection feature wherein a user can designate certain files or “objects” to be immutable, meaning they cannot be altered or deleted by anyone until the retention period has expired. This layer of protection is essential for protecting your data from cybersecurity threats and maintaining regulatory compliance. 

So why is Object Lock so important during Cybersecurity Awareness month and all year long? 

Well, because things change – especially staff. Using immutable objects ensures that information is immune from accidental or intentional deletion and alteration. It guarantees that once the information lands in the Wasabi hot storage cloud, it will remain there until the lock expires. And because cybercriminals attack backups and archives as part of their ransomware campaigns. It isn’t enough that they’re taking down the primary systems, but they’re also attacking the secondary/backup systems to ensure they get their ransom. 

This month and always, take a hard look at immutability for your data using Object Lock with Wasabi. For more information click here.