Anshuman Rai
Area Vice President, India, and South Asia - 
Commvault

Ransomware pitfalls are aggressively evolving. Bad actors are continuously innovating, employing complex and sophisticated methods to silently bypass perimeter defences and conventional safety tools. However, it is no longer confined to their advanced strategies but their motives that have come into play. 

2021 was a ground-breaking year for ransomware wreaking disturbances on businesses and people around the world. In fact, India has been one of the worst victims of ransomware attacks over the last year. As per Indian Computer Emergency Response Team report, there were more than 14.02 Lakhs cyber security related incidents last year. Unfortunately, it is a trend that will continue in 2022 and beyond.

FROM RANSOM TO EXTORTION
While traditional ransomware attacks focus on encrypting data and holding it captive for a lump sum payout, newer threats are concentrating on the double and triple extortion of business data. In fact,a survey by Venafi reveals that 83% of successful ransomware attacks now involve alternative extortion methods and only a mere 17% of attackers ask for money for a decryption key. Thus, these matured attacks utilize multi-fold ways to monetize and abuse business and personal data.

As these bad actors shift their interest, organizations must also redesign their data protection strategy to shield their data from attackers instead of trying to recover it from bad actors.

WHY RECOVERY IS NOT ENOUGH
Customary data protection solutions have always been touted as the last line of defence,offering serviceability for businesses to rebound post incidents. However, these tools are usually brought about after the data has already been compromised and business has been hampered. To stay ahead of data threats, business continuity needs to be the core of your organizational strategy. As such, enterprises must adopt improved and advanced technologies that can detect and control threats before any data is breached.

On an average,the attack dwell time is 28 days, which provides the bad actors ample time to access critical data and resources, move laterally between environments, elevate privileges, and propagate an attack while evading traditional detection tools and security.

An advanced and modern data protection solution actively spots these threats, engages, and addresses the unknown and zero-day threats in time to protect your data from the onset of an attack.

THE LAST LINE OF DEFENCE
A cyber-ready ransomware strategy involves a comprehensive approach. Apart from the deployment of preventive measures, enterprises must invest in intelligent solutions that reduce the impact of a successful breach. Data is truly the crown jewel of all businesses, and it needs to be accessible and recoverable to cut on downtime and data loss. A holistic and modern data protection solution goes a long way to be cyber ready while serving as your last line of defence. A robust data protection solution offers strong controls to restore and recover data fast, and also reduces the blast radius of a successful breach with cutting-edge capabilities such as anomaly detection, to identify patterns in data and access that give early warning of attackers who have gotten in the door.

IT TAKES A VILLAGE
As bad actors implement more complex tactics in an attempt to paralyze an organization’s ability to respond, an effective and robust data management platform insulates your data, putting it out of reach, thus implying reduced downtime, stronger business resiliency, and no payouts.

Data Management as a Service (DMaaS), such as Commvault’s Metallic empowers businesses to secure and restore their data on cloud to minimize the impact of an attack. With features such as Zero-trust, multi-layered security, with air-gapped data backups, Metallic ensures that the data backup copies remain unaffected, even if the breach happens in production environments. By monitoring irregularities and behaviors in data, Metallic can also spot latent ransomware and inform proper backup operations to sanitize threats. The inbuilt top-tier security tooling and incident response, further allows Metallic to uncover dormant ransomware files and flag them for customer remediation. By implementing a dual approach, Metallic helps enterprises be cyber-ready by helping to identify ransomware before it spreads, alongside tools to rapidly recover from attack. That’s a win-win for digital enterprises of today!