Offsite and Untouchable: Mitigating Ransomware Risk with Object Lock for Data Immutability

Every day when I turn on the news, it seems there’s another report of a college or company being hit with a Ransomware attack. One high-profile attack, however, seems to have brought significantly more attention and focus to this issue.

In early May, 2021, the Colonial Pipeline attack forced one of the largest fuel suppliers to shut down its distribution of gas and jet fuel to the Eastern United States. This event ended up causing panicked gas buying and shortages in twelve states which brought heightened attention to key infrastructure vulnerabilities in the country.

With no other option to get their pipeline running again, Colonial was forced to pay $4.4 Million to the Eastern European cyber hackers called DarkSide. However, it still took an entire week for the pipeline to restore distribution and get the supply chain back on track, and several more days for the country to get back to normal following the attack.

This prompted the Biden Administration and the Department of Homeland Security to take action requiring all companies to increase their reporting and auditing cadence following a cyberattack, or risk incurring financial penalties.

Because ransomware attacks are on the rise, this begs the question of whether organizations are adequately prepared to recover quickly and with minimal impact to themselves, their partners and customers. If they are not, what should they do to be more proactive with their readiness?

Ensuring you have a solid backup and ransomware recovery strategy can be the simple difference between paying huge ransoms to keep your business running or simply recovering your backup, using an industry leading backup provider like Veeam.

The golden rule for backup is “3 2 1”. 3 Copies of the data, 2 different types of media/systems, 1 copy at a remote site. Veeam has turned this rule up to “11”, adding guidance that also includes 1 copy should be immutable and there should be 0 issues with data integrity.

In addition to this expanded best practice for backups, leveraging data immutability via Object Lock is more likely to provide fast response and recovery should an attack occur. For the unaware, 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 set retention period has expired. This layer of protection is considered essential for protecting your data from cybersecurity threats and maintaining regulatory compliance.

Wasabi and Veeam have partnered to provide a next-level protection with data immutability through Veeam’s Backup and Replication, which now supports Object Lock for Wasabi hot cloud storage. Having Object Lock supported by your backup and recovery solution as well as your cloud storage vendor provides seamless integration for an additional layer of protection in the fight against ransomware.

Key benefits of Wasabi Object Lock for Veeam Backup and Replication are:

• Customizable immutability at the object level
• Support for compliance mode for ultimate protection
• Combats ransomware and viruses
• Prevention of accidental data erasure
• Ensures regulatory compliance

So when you think of best practices to protect your data from bad actors, make sure to include Object Lock and take advantage of compliance and governance driven data immutability from Wasabi and Veeam! This way, when you store your data, you do so without any further concern about losing it and you'll sleep better too!

Learn more about how the joint solution protects your data with immutability.

You can try out Veeam and Wasabi together with our free trials:

• For a free trial of Veeam click here.
• For a free trial of Wasabi click here.