How to Recover from Ransomware Attack? Master the 7 Key Points of Ransomware Recovery Best Practices
In recent years, ransomware attacks have escalated and evolved into a business model, causing severe impacts across various industries and resulting in significant losses of data and assets for organizations.
The 2022 SonicWall Cyber Threat Report revealed a staggering statistic, with a total of 6.233 billion ransomware attacks reported globally in 2022, averaging 19 attacks per second.
This underscores the urgent need for organizations to strengthen their defenses.
Therefore, having a comprehensive ransomware recovery plan is crucial for IT administrators, as it can minimize the impact of an attack and restore business operations in the shortest possible time.
However, based on past experiences, no organization can entirely prevent all cyber attacks.
Hence, organizations need to prioritize “recovery.”
That’s why “backup” is widely recognized as one of the most effective defenses against ransomware attacks: having recent, secure, and verified backups increases the likelihood of successful recovery while reducing downtime and minimizing the risk of data loss.
Key Elements of Ransomware Recovery Plan
Ransomware attacks pose one of the most challenging recovery scenarios for organizations.
The impacted businesses or institutions may encounter operational issues caused by the attack.
Synology, recognizing the nature of ransomware, has analysed and identified the key elements of a ransomware recovery plan:
- No more data silos
With advancements in technology and diverse developments, tools used by enterprises in operations or development typically span multiple platforms.
Neglecting certain workloads is equivalent to exposing the organization to the risk of ransomware attacks.
Therefore, in terms of backups, enterprises must avoid any data silos and include all data in a comprehensive backup mechanism.
- Efficient, fast backups
As enterprise data rapidly grow, these data not only need to be retained for subsequent analysis but may also be transferred to the cloud or applied to IoT devices.
Hence, the amount of data required for backups in the organizational environment will only increase.
Therefore, enterprises need a system that can efficiently and quickly backup data, even when all data is fully backed up, it can significantly shorten the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) time interval.
- Backup data retention period
Modern ransomware has a latent period of up to 30 to 90 days.
Therefore, backup data must be effectively and securely stored to cope with any unexpected incidents, ensuring clean and restorable data to maintain continuous business operations.
- Testing the restorability of backups
Since organizations cannot predict when they will fall victim to ransomware attacks, continuous testing and drills of the restorability of backup data must be conducted in such uncertain environments.
This not only helps increase the credibility of backups but also ensures that the organization can correctly execute and quickly recover in the face of ransomware threats.
- Inaccessible backup architecture
Common ransomware attack methods involve encrypting an organization’s original data and simultaneously deleting existing backup data.
Therefore, the backup data of enterprises must maintain sufficient security, possess tamper-proof features, and have the ability to isolate ransomware directly in network or physical environments, ensuring the organization always has a clean and restorable copy of data.
- Fast, resilient restoration
When organizations are hit by ransomware attacks, the primary goal is to ensure continuous operations, involving two critical points: “time” and “flexibility.”
To minimize downtime, instant restoration must be achieved to shorten the Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
Moreover, since ransomware often targets a single platform, backups must have cross-platform and cross-hypervisor restoration capabilities to mitigate the risks of restoration.
- User-friendly, centralized management
The complexity of enterprise IT environments is increasing.
While most enterprises use native protective mechanisms for backups, the high complexity of management can lead to human errors or oversights, which is a vulnerability for ransomware attacks.
Therefore, backups need to have centralized management functionality while providing data visibility to monitor that all backups in the environment are operating normally.
How Synology Helps Enterprises Implement Ransomware Recovery Plans
Synology’s data protection solutions offer essential elements to assist enterprises in combating ransomware.
They safeguard enterprise data, ensure the security of backups, and facilitate effective recovery, constructing a comprehensive data protection solution for businesses:
Safeguard you data
- Cross-Platform Centralized Backup: Provides centralized protection for cross-platform data, including the organization’s core infrastructure and cloud applications, ensuring the secure protection of data across the entire ecosystem.
- Meet the 3-2-1 Backup Rule: Data can be backed up to multiple destinations, such as replicating to offsite backup servers or cloud storage, ensuring the availability of backup data.
Protect you backups
- Data Immutability: Supports immutable backups to prevent any unauthorized changes or deletions, protecting enterprise backup data from the impact of ransomware and other malicious attacks.
- Air-Gap: Based on the principles of the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s “Safe Haven Project,” ensures that the environment where your backup is deployed can be isolated from potential ransomware attacks.
- Access Control: Supports Active Directory and LDAP, as well as SAML 2.0, allowing organizations to implement multi-factor authentication to enhance the security of backup server access.
Data restoration
- Regular Recovery Drills: Enables organizations to regularly restore data into the built-in Hypervisor for testing in a sandbox environment. This allows for recovery drills without affecting operational sites, ensuring data recoverability.
- Support for Multiple Recovery Methods: Provides diverse and flexible recovery capabilities, including bare-metal recovery, file-level recovery, and database recovery.
This empowers enterprises to choose the most suitable recovery method based on specific needs. - Heterogeneous Platform Recovery: In the event of an incident, real-time recovery can be achieved in VMware or Hyper-V virtualized environments.
You can quickly launch backup images in these virtual environments, meeting the requirements for cross-platform recovery, including P2V and V2V.
Conclusion
Ransomware attacks have surged at an alarming rate in recent years, causing significant damage to businesses and organizations.
Data protection and continuous operation have become top priorities for enterprises.
Synology’s data protection solution adheres to best practices, defining the optimal “Ransomware Recovery Plan” for businesses.
It strengthens an organization’s defense against ransomware attacks, effectively assisting enterprises in achieving uninterrupted operations.
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