Acronis stated that as the number and sophistication of cyberattacks increases, so does the importance of protecting corporate backups and backup solutions themselves. Leading backup solutions therefore now standardly integrate tools for ensuring backup immutability, as these often represent the last obstacle to a successful attack or extortion attempt for cybercriminals.
“Whatever the attacker’s objective, backups usually stand in their way,” says Aleš Hok, Sales Director at ZEBRA SYSTEMS, representing Acronis in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. “It is therefore logical that the final step in completing the devastation by encrypting or deleting data is the attacker’s effort to get rid of them. If an attacker has access to the network for an extended period and obtains credentials for the backup storage or even the backup solution itself, they will succeed.”
Acronis therefore recommends that users take advantage of backup immutability (so-called immutable backups), which means configuring the backup solution so that backups stored in a given repository cannot be altered in any way for a defined period of time. This applies even if the attacker has full access to the backup solution itself. The principle of this time lock cannot be bypassed even by modifying the retention policy of the backup plan.
Another recommended step is activating the self-defense system. It prevents any process running on a machine with a backup agent from overwriting, deleting, damaging, or encrypting backups. The protected machine thus effectively becomes a protector of backups against itself and processes running on it, including malware and ransomware.
These protection elements are a standard part of the three layers of cyber protection included in Acronis Cyber Protect and Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud solutions and services:
- Proactive protection – features such as vulnerability scanning, patch management, malware removal from backups, and backup immutability
- Active protection – Continuous Data Protection (CDP) tools, active protection, self-defense protection
- Reactive protection – recovery, instant recovery, Disaster Recovery, forensic backup for investigation
More information, including a live demonstration, will be available at the webinar Immutable backups plus active protection against Acronis ransomware, which will take place on Thursday, February 10.
Article author: ZEBR.ai editorial team
