Quadric Software

NSA Leaked Malware Proves Backups are the Only Defense

The most recent cyberattacks using NSA leaked malware have left a devastating toll worldwide, hitting Europe particularly hard. Because internal passwords can be obtained through the exploitation of new technologies, cyber security experts are advising businesses to prepare for the worst.

Katherine Kearns, Principal Consultant at the NCC Group, has been quoted in numerous articles that for companies who haven’t been hit, it’s not a matter of “if” but “when.”

What’s the ultimate message taken from cyber security professionals? There’s only one defense against ransomware: complete, secure, and restorable backups.

Why is the NSA Leaked Malware the Worst?

NPR’s Robert Seigel interviewed Dmitri Alperovitch of the cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike, in a recent segment about the NSA leaked malware attacks. In the interview, Alperovitch explains why this most recent malware is worse than others and confirms that adequate backups are really the only protection against such “insidious” attacks.

Here’s an excerpt from that interview taken directly from NPR’s website:

“SIEGEL: And for an institution that has been hacked and that didn’t pay a ransom, what sort of jeopardy are they in? What might happen to them?

ALPEROVITCH: The data is gone.“

So What Does All This Mean?

While it is clear that backups are the only protection against malware, many experts don’t go into the details of what an “adequate” backup would look like for most organizations. This leaves many companies with more questions.

What’s an appropriate backup schedule for my environment? How many backups should I keep given my time and resources? What measures do I take to ensure that my backups are secure?

If you’re asking yourself these questions, we can help. In fact, we addressed these concerns in a previous blog post.

Here’s what we recommended:

1. Keep as many backups as your resources will allow.
2. Store backups in multiple locations, not just in the cloud.
3. Don’t use the same credentials to access the backup storage as the ones used for production environments.
4. Regularly test backups to ensure that they are recoverable.

How Can Alike Help?

Luckily, we haven’t heard from any of our customers that they’ve been affected by the NSA leaked malware, but we are confident that Alike can restore their data. One of the best examples of Alike’s ability to help businesses recover after a disaster happened recently when one of our customer’s original data store was destroyed. The IT staff fully recovered their environment from the Alike backups stored in their Amazon S3 account, and they were up and running again after very little downtime.

Need more reasons to use Alike to protect your organization from a cyber attack? Not only will Alike’s powerful deduplication allow you to keep more backups without using up valuable resources, but Alike’s unique replication capabilities also provide an additional safety net to ensure that your backups are fully recoverable. Our customers also rave about Alike’s intuitive design, making it incredibly easy to use.

Want to see it in action in your own environment? Take Alike for a test drive with our 30-day free trial. You won’t be disappointed in Alike’s simple, powerful, protection.

More About Alike

Flexible, affordable, and easy to use, Alike offers a competitive suite of powerful backup and recovery solutions for XenServer, Hyper-V, and Windows physical servers. The Alike DR disaster recovery features include enhanced replication and offsite vaulting to secure your assets and protect your business from disaster, while minimizing downtime and maximizing your resources.