Responding to a Ransomware Attack: Clean Recovery Options are Critical

Najaf Husain, CEO

Ransomware attacks have become an ever-present threat to organizations of all sizes and industries. These malicious attacks can wreak havoc on a company’s operations, causing significant financial and reputational damage. To combat this growing menace, it’s crucial for businesses to have a well-thought-out ransomware response plan in place. 

Preparing for a Ransomware Attack 

The significance of having well-established, clean, and uncompromised recovery options cannot be overstated. Even with leading Extended Detection and Response (XDR) solutions, breaches can still occur, as evidenced by notable incidents like the attack on the City of Dallas, which showcased the persistence of attackers within networks despite robust defenses. Once these infiltrators gain access, they can target data stored on Elastic Block Storage (EBS) volumes or delete objects in Amazon S3, effectively holding them hostage for ransom, similar to what they would do with a Virtual Machine.

The Importance of Verified Clean Recovery Options

Elastio steps in to provide a solution. It offers the capability to create data snapshots, archiving them in a globally deduplicated and compressed format within S3 inside your account. We call this the Elastio Cyber Vault. Snapshots ingested into the vault undergo a thorough file inspection, scanning for over 2200 ransomware families and thousands of variants to ensure the data remains clean, uncompromised, and recoverable. If any active ransomware or malware is detected, specific files are promptly identified and sent to a Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) system. Elastio’s incident response team takes it from there, analyzing the alerts and confirming the findings. The Vault itself is protected by S3 Object Lock to ensure that even admin-level IAM credentials are incapable of destroying it. 

Elastio also offers multiple recovery options, ranging from restoring to a known clean recovery point, enabling file-level recoveries, as well as EC2 and EBS recoveries. For infected assets, there’s an option to recover them in an isolated sandbox environment. When it comes to production workloads, the Elastio live recovery option stands out by providing a rapid Recovery Time Objective (RTO) in a matter of minutes from the last known clean recovery point.

To further fortify security and ensure a robust response plan, Elastio continuously snapshots the data, archives it, and checks its data integrity. This ongoing process not only enhances security but also acts as the ultimate safeguard, serving as the last line of defense in a comprehensive security strategy.

The Last Line of Defense

In essence, ransomware attacks are a numbers game involving a constant barrage of attempts until one inevitably breaches the defenses. This highlights the necessity of having a robust response plan that includes clean and uncompromised backups, such as those offered by Elastio, to ensure that even if an attack occurs, your organization can swiftly recover without paying the ransom.

How Elastio Helps

Elastio’s data resilience platform ensures that your live data and backups are clean, uncompromised, and recoverable from ransomware attacks.

Elastio reverse-engineered over 2200 ransomware families and developed the most comprehensive ransomware detection engine capable of pinpointing ransomware down to individual variants and files. Our advanced behavioral analytics model thoroughly examines your data for ransomware, malware, and corruption, providing the means for a secure recovery through point-in-time restoration of applications and data to a verified clean copy.

With a proven track record of tens of billions of ransomware scans, our agentless platform empowers customers to validate the integrity of their live data and backups across AWS, Azure, and VMware. This includes securing critical areas of enterprise risk — core workloads, production databases, and object storage, ensuring that your data remains clean, uncompromised, and recoverable.