The Ransom Wars

Episode II: The Hacker Strikes Back(up)

Backup appliances – both pure software and dedicated hardware – are major targets for sophisticated hackers, whose goal is to not only encrypt the production data, but also make recovery more complex. By doing so, they increase their chances of the attacked organization paying their ransom, and sooner. This is just their business model. As most organizations have less than five active backup appliances, intruding the network, locating those appliances, and attacking them directly is not a complicated task for hackers.
For the organization, however, recovering those appliances could take much longer than anticipated. While setting up the backup software from scratch should only take a couple of hours, that is not the end of the story. Most traditional backup solutions save backup images in private pools (compressed, deduplicated, etc.). Therefore, once the system is re-installed, it needs to “acquire” the existing pools – a process that could take up to a whole day for just a 50TB-sized pool. During this time, the backup appliance is unavailable for recovery tasks. Instead, you need to take a deep breath and tell your CEO to wait patiently for more than half a day before you can begin testing the backup images.
Alternatively, you can use the Actifio appliance. Running a cut-down and hardened copy of Linux provides corporate networks with a reduced attack surface compared to Windows servers. This hardened virtual appliance does not enable a range of approaches that have set out to compromise it. And that’s not all. If you add the Actifio OnVault facility, which is based on Object Storage, additional Actifio appliances are able to connect to a given pool, grab the metadata, and start mounting images almost immediately. This could take place in the main site, disaster recovery site, cloud facility, etc. For increased recovery throughput, just connect a number of Actifio appliances to your OnVault pool and let them recover different databases simultaneously.

Epilog: How do we get this done?

Datagon Systems provides end-to-end consultancy, design, and deployment services based on the Actifio platform and combined with the most suitable third-party products. For the resilience of your data.

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