DailyPost 2910
A SAFETY VALVE FOR RANSOMWARE ATTACKS
If one cyber crime has taken over the world’s imagination, that is ransomware. One attack and the organisation is brought to its knees. It cripples in manners unimaginable. The cost of paying and not paying is evaluated over and over again whenever a big enterprise faces this attack and more often than not, ransom is paid, whether it is made public or not is a different issue. The expertise and division of labour in the ransomware supply chain can drive anyone mad. Yet, the victim organisations are fighting it nearly solo. Investigations from the victims point of view have not yielded any result of value.
Needless to say that if data, all that is required to run any specified organisation / enterprise, is readily available it would be of immense value in times of crisis. The organisation can go up and functional in a very short time. The nature of backups currently available and the confidence of it bringing to life, when ransomware attack really takes place does not enthuse any confidence. It is not a part of strategic design that such backup data can go into production, if need be. If a third party could do that job in a professional high-tech manner, will that not be of great help.
Today the facility of imagination is being rolled out from Google stables. Google has introduced ‘Air’Gapped’ Backup Vault to thwart ransomware. This new backup storage vault has been fitted into the flagship service. In the world of raging ransomware attacks, this would help organisations protect backed-up data for resilience in case of a crippling ransomware attack. What is required out of such storage is to be executable at a later stage? That is what it is meant for. The new feature takes care of both such needs. It promises being immutable (preventing modification) and indelible (preventing deletion).
The utility is being added to Google Cloud Backup and Disaster Recovery (DR) service. It is meant to combat ransomware attacks and target backed-up data during encryption and extortion cyber-attacks. Backup is the last resort when the production data is either unavailable or untrusted. The Vault is designed to be separate as would be logically air-gapped from an organisation’s self-managed Google Cloud Project. What is being touted is a very reliable and flexible recovery of data from the vaults that are self-contained. What is most fascinating and utilitarian is that all this is designed to happen even when the source resource is longer available.
GOOGLE BACKUP VAULT IS A GIANT PROACTIVE STEP IN THE MANAGEMENT OF RANSOMWARE CRISIS.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening,