As of recently, ransomware has been dominating the security conversation, and instead of things getting better, it just seems to be getting worse, and many people and organisations still don’t understand how these attacks unfold.
Business Tech Africa had the opportunity to sit down with the Veeam Team to find out what exactly is the cause of the sudden extreme rise in ransomware.
Patrick Rohrbasser, who is the Regional Vice President Southern Europe & Africa at Veeam said we continue to accelerate the digital transformation. “You cannot work without high level of technology.” He mentioned that for hackers that is business because they are able to generate a lot of money by using this technology. “You can now go on the dark web now, you can subscribe to an ad for 30 minutes, you have promotions you will receive 5 minutes free, and then you can have your subtitle.” He mentioned that the hackers are now very creative in terms of breaching the systems.
The hackers are now providing training and coaching. They now have resources in place to make their operations easier. “When hackers wipe out your data, you have to pay most of the time in order for you to be able to run your business again and to get back your data, and that’s the reality.”
In terms of advice points for companies to protect themselves from being scammed:
“Firstly, the companies have to assess themselves to say “maybe we have some breaches” and then you need to get advice to make the right decision, because maybe your solution is not the right one. Yes that’s a risk of change, but change is always a risk.”
Rohrbasser stressed that you cannot be changing solutions as a business, especially if your system is complex and diverse and protected. “You need to consider that the solutions you will use, must offer you the capacity first. The capacity to be radical. Sometimes just a compromise, can have big consequences.
How to become more cyber resilient
We learned that there is a strategy that National Institute of Standards and Technology, and diving deeper into it was Veeam’s Technical Sales Manager in Africa, Ian Engelbrcht. He revealed that they have a cybersecurity framework which compromises of a few factor; Identify, Protect, Detect, Respond and Recover.
He advised that if you take those simple steps when designing your cybersecurity strategy, you should be capable of being able to protect yourself.
- You need to identify where the gaps are, and where intensely you’re compromised.
- Create a protection plan. Protect your data in a way that a neutral type of storage. Use a 32110 or 321 backup strategy in case your protection is being compromised.
- You need to have tools in place to monitor and alert you when something is happening, when there’s a breach, so that you can be able to respond.
- One of the biggest problems is responding when there’s a breach of security, then its just a failure. For example, if you get hacked and you don’t have those steps outlined and you don’t have a process to follow, you’re going to be offline for longer, or the hackers will have more time in your environment to cause more damage.
- Once your process is set, the recovery should be easier in order for you to not pay the ransom. With that being said though, there is one important point in the recovery. You need to make sure that whatever you are recovering is sanitized. When a hacker gets into your environment, they generally deploy little tools to gather information and exploit that, and then they’ll encrypt your data, and then they’ll send you a ransomware note to say “if you try and do anything, we’ll destroy everything and you won’t be able to recover.
According to Ian Engelbrcht, if hackers figure out that you are trying to recover your backup data and it has not been sanitized, they usually take up the ransomware amount and you either have to pay up or let them distribute or delete all your data.
That is why it is important to make sure that your backup strategy is cyber resilient because times have changed, and people are constantly finding different ways to access your infrastructure.
