When the Irish Health Care System (HSE)’s data was ransom attacked, 80% of their data became corrupted and unusable. In July, the city of Columbus experienced a ransomware attack that disrupted various municipal services, and months later, it is still working towards recovery.
Ransomware attacks are becoming more frequent and causing unprecedented chaos and financial distress.
Few organizations have been this transparent following a ransomware attack, but HSE and Columbus are far from alone. Following ransomware attacks, organizations rely on their data protection solution to recover and restore business operations as quickly as possible.
However, instead of providing a timely and confident recovery, the limitations of traditional data protection and storage solutions become exposed, and organizations are left paying the ransom, and even then, only 4% get all of their data back (Sophos, States of Ransomware, 2022).
This demonstrates how traditional data protection solutions fail to fully support cyber resiliency, despite having added “cyber” features to their products. Features like immutability, isolation, virus scanning, and multi-factor authentication are often easily integrated. Some vendors even rely on marketing hype, attempting to position themselves as security vendors rather than delivering real value.
Key Questions to Ask About Data Protection
Here are key questions that traditional data protection solutions struggle to answer regarding cyber resiliency:
1. What was the Impact of the Attack?
Data protection vendors often rely on high-level analysis to detect unusual activity in backups or snapshots. This includes threshold analysis, identifying unusual file changes, or detecting changes in compression rates that may suggest ransomware encryption.
These methods are essentially guesses prone to false positives. During a ransomware attack, details matter. Leveraging advanced AI engines to detect patterns indicative of cyberattacks offers more accuracy, reduces false alerts, and provides the critical details of exactly what files and databases were impacted to support smarter recovery.
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