Pay money to get your data back? It sounds like a distant concept, yet more and more companies and organizations are facing this question. The answer at first will invariably be “no, of course not! After all: there is a backup and if you just restore it, everything is back to normal. Solved that way, right? Not so.

Of course you won’t pay a ransom! Right?

Pay? Or rebuild?

The Volkskrant reported May 3 on Van der Helm Logistics, which was hit by a ransomware attack. Twenty servers were hacked, plus 200 PCs as well as backups. Rebuilding all the data would take weeks: a route that would all but lead the company to bankruptcy. And so there was no option but to negotiate with the cybercriminals. Yes, there was a 12-hour-old backup, but in the meantime, so many goods had been moved in the logistics company that that backup was actually severely outdated.

This went wrong beforehand:

1. Hackers got in through an outdated VPN service. This might have been prevented by a good update policy, but 100 percent certainty that no hacker will penetrate your network simply does not exist. The danger of hackers intruding obviously increases with the growth of working from home.
2. The hackers spent days trying to crack passwords, which eventually succeeded. Good security software may be able to notice such activities, but good hackers can undoubtedly take this into account and bypass the software.
3. Once the hackers get to that point, there is no stopping them from then encrypting all servers and all online backups with administrative rights.
4. As a result, all usable – read current – backups were no longer accessible.
5. Offline backups with air-gap, which therefore cannot be encrypted, were not available because the hardware used was broken.
6. In the end, there was nothing to do but pay a hefty ransom to prevent the company from going out of business.

There is little you can do about steps 2 through 4 if step 1, hacker intrusion, cannot be 100 percent prevented. So you then have only step 5 to avoid having to make the choice between bankruptcy and ransom.

Solution

So it is critical to have a working offline backup in the event of a ransomware attack. And this can be done very easily with Silent Bricks: an offline backup storage system that offers fast restore and always comprehensive maintenance, so you always have a working system and always up-to-date air-gapped backups. Check it out here: https://www.comex.eu/producten/back-up

Want to know more? Please inquire about the possibilities with no obligation!