Business Backing Up Their Data To Backup Servers On Their Network Should Realize Their Backups Can Be Completely Destroyed.
The headlines keep coming in—reports of business large and small—hospitals, police departments, doctor’s offices, restaurants—all fall victim to ransomware and cybercrime. And the majority of these organizations failed to recover their data because they didn’t have a solid backup strategy.
While having a protected network should be part of any IT Support Team’s on-going security strategy, relying solely on a first line of defense to protect your business continuity has left businesses in ruin. Over 85% of businesses experiencing a data breach fail within two years of a cyberattack.
And of those businesses, nearly all (93%!) assumed that simply having a backup server on their network would protect them from disaster.
The problem with making an assumption that your backups are safe is that your backup server can be easily destroyed by a Crypto attack.
Recall the latest ransomware attacks can autonomously crawl your network. That means that even when a cybercriminal may have penetrated your network through an email phishing campaign from one single user, it may be able to encrypt all of the files on your network INCLUDING your backups!
So what are basics you should be doing with your backup disaster recovery to make sure if you need to restore, you can?
Set up your backups off your network—if you don’t want to face the startling surprise that all of your backup files (the ones you were supposed to restore to during a ransom attack!) are encrypted or destroyed, I’d strongly consider getting your backup server off of your primary network.
Consider using different operating system or environment for backups— In addition to keeping your server off network, consider making it a bit harder for an attacker to get in with the same attack they would use to penetrate your network. We often use a different operating system and environment for backups because it adds one more step of complexity from the attack to the backup data you will be depending on after the attack.
Consider a redundant backup— just in case one fails, you’ll always have a fallback. We subscribe to the mantra of being safer than sorry. Redundancy is one key to help your business ensure that if something happens to one copy of the data, the second one will still be available to recover in the event of a disaster.
Make sure you have everything backed up— if you’re planning on restoring your network from a backup, you need to carefully consider what you need backed up. Will you be okay with simply critical documents? Or is your environment complex or very specific to the point where you need to have certain configurations just right on your network? Make sure that everything you need is backed up (note: storage keeps coming down in costs, so it might be better to err on the safe side when it comes to backing up your data).
Backup regularly— most businesses I audit only backup occasionally. They have no rhyme or reason to backing up—simply thought it was time for another backup. I recommend a tiered approach to your backups.
Monitor Backup Servers— just as your IT Support should be proactively monitoring your network for suspicious activity, they should also monitor your backup server to ensure everything is working. If a drive looks like it might fail, they should proactively replace it with a functional drive to ensure your backups are working the way you expect them to.
Test your backups— Most IT Support companies fail to test your backups. Why is this an issue? They never know whether your backups are working. IT guys tend to have backups automatically run every so often. They might tell you the backup is working (but what they really mean is that the backup is running—you may never have a successful backup that you can restore to, but the process reported that it was running alright). We test our backups daily to make sure if you would be able to restore from one in the event of a ransomware attack or other disaster. (Note—since we test our backups we know that they are over 99.95 % successful. Does your IT Support know their backup success rate?).
Are your backups in good hands?
Is Your Disaster Recovery strategy risking your backups? Is your IT Support considering the consequences of insecure backup strategies? Do you want to get informed whether your backups are working? Contact us today for a FREE network assessment to determine whether your backups are safe from ransomware.
