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Protect Your Backups From Ransomware Too

October 5, 2017

Ransomware infections have grown by leaps and bounds over the last few years. The whole point of ransomware is to encrypt your data and force you to pay the ransom. Your protection is to make sure you have adequate backups that are impervious to ransomware attacks, but how do you do that? Dark Reading has a post that discusses considerations for data backup in four recommendations.

The first recommendation is to be careful when using network devices and file shares. Ransomware attacks devices that appear as a drive letter to your system. The bad news is that newer versions also attack data that is referenced using UNC (Universal Naming Convention) such as //<server name>/<share name>. The second recommendation is to monitor your systems to detect a ransomware infection as soon as possible. Third is to engineer your backup properly. Make sure that your data backups can't be "seen" by the infection. The last recommendation is one you should always do anyway. Test your backup and make sure you can restore your data. Just because the log files say things are successful doesn't mean that the data is not corrupted and can be restored.

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