While vendors like AWS provide tools for increasing your security posture, protecting against ransomware requires more than standard EBS snapshots.
Every day, IT leaders must prepare themselves for both new and existing threats that have the potential to severely disrupt mission-critical business operations. Ransomware is one of those threats, and it’s posing a serious risk to cloud-hosted data and applications too. Today, more than two thirds of malware downloads originate from cloud apps, and ransomware accounts for a sizable portion of that.
The limitations of EBS snapshots against ransomware attacks
Security challenges in the cloud typically stem from complexity. Multi-cloud environments can be highly scalable, agile, and cost-effective, but they’re also inherently complex. The EBS snapshots provided by AWS are simply not enough to detect, respond or recover from ransomware attacks by themselves and costs can quickly increase too.
Until recently, the cloud was a relatively safe haven from ransomware, at least compared to traditional environments. However, newer and more sophisticated ransomware strains have been specifically designed to exploit today’s cloud and multi-cloud infrastructures. Some new and emerging strains even use cloud storage services themselves for malware injection. One of the first of this kind was the Jigsaw ransomware, which took advantage of the way cloud storage works by synchronizing encrypted files across all nodes connected to the location – including backups.
Automating ransomware detection in the cloud
What makes modern ransomware so dangerous is its ability to spread indiscriminately across cloud environments. Thus, the number-one goal in protecting against ransomware should be to reduce its ability to spread by logically isolating cloud storage resources, such as EBS and EC2 instances in AWS. Cloud security teams must also implement automated inspection and protection across their environments, while also having a centralized management console where they can monitor their applications and data and apply one set of policies.
Inspecting your recovery points for ransomware
Ransomware extortionists know that most of their potential victims have backup and recovery systems in place that can largely counter the effects of a successful attack. Because of this, ransomware is often designed to target backups, such as native cloud snapshots, as well. To mitigate these risks, every recovery point should be scanned for ransomware and other forms of malware for the sake of proactive protection. Furthermore, recovery points must be secured in an immutable vault so they cannot be tampered with.
Understanding your ransomware recovery posture
Your ransomware recovery posture refers to your ability to mitigate the effects of a successful ransomware attack. Given the extremely dynamic and unpredictable nature of cyberthreats, it is essential that you know your recovery posture at any given point or time. You need to have the right type of backup and be able to restore it to the required point in time before the attack, with minimal disruption and in accordance with your RPOs and RTOs. To do this, you need a cyber recovery solution with ransomware free backups that provides automatic asset detection, response and, rapid recovery of instances, and a centralized way to monitor and manage cyber recovery operations.
About Elastio
Elastio detects and precisely identifies ransomware in your data and assures rapid post-attack recovery. Our data resilience platform protects against cyber attacks when traditional cloud security measures fail.
Elastio’s agentless deep file inspection continuously monitors business-critical data to identify threats and enable quick response to compromises and infected files. Elastio provides best-in-class application protection and recovery and delivers immediate time-to-value.
