An overview of the history of ransomware, its potential impact and best practices to protect IT systems.
Ransomware attacks are on the rise. According to Cybersecurity Ventures, ransomware will cost organizations across the globe over $20 billion by 2021, with general cybercrime expected to make a $6 trillion impact—estimates including costs associated with restoring data and infrastructure as well as the often-hidden expenses of mitigating the social damage of an attack.
Ransomware is the fastest-growing global malware threat and one that often catastrophically impacts an organization, accounting for the majority of extortion-based events and causing billions of dollars in losses for organizations around the world today. It has the potential to disrupt all organizations using computing infrastructure—whether on-premises, managed by a third-party, virtual or in the cloud.
Having a reliable backup and recovery solution is the most vital step toward building a reliable ransomware prevention plan. Today, companies often rely on several backup paradigms, including traditional backup as well as replication and continuous data protection (CDP). Each of these methods is valuable for creating copies of data, and in the case of replication, moving copies to local or remote storage—a notable benefit in the effort to create distance, or air gap, between backup data and the organization’s network.