Beyond Backup: Fortify Your Data Resilience Against Cyberattacks

A recent Sophos ransomware report from 2023 highlighted a chilling statistic: 94% of organizations hit by ransomware reported that attackers attempted to compromise their backup solution. Even more concerning, 57% of these attempts were successful across all sectors. Why? Because if attackers can neutralize your “insurance policy”—your backups—you have no easy way to recover data, making you far more likely to pay the ransom.

Beyond encryption, 32% of incidents involving data encryption also resulted in data theft, leading to “double extortion” threats where stolen data is released to the dark web if the ransom isn’t paid. This underscores the critical need for backups to be not just immutable (unchangeable), but also indelible, meaning snapshots cannot be deleted until their retention period expires.

Securing your backup infrastructure is also paramount for regulatory compliance (HIPAA, GDPR, PCI, etc.) and business continuity, as systems must be recovered quickly and free of malware.

Foundational Security: The Non-Negotiables

While seemingly basic, many foundational security measures are often overlooked or incorrectly configured in data protection environments.

• Secure Backup Accounts: Change all default passwords for admin, support, and out-of-band management accounts immediately. Integrate with SSO providers like Duo, Okta, Ping, Azure AD (formerly Azure AD FS), and ADFS.
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA): Enable MFA for all user accounts, including local, Active Directory, and SSO users, wherever feasible.
• Granular Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): Implement minimum privileged access, giving users only the rights necessary to perform their job functions. Avoid granting widespread admin access, which poses a significant security risk. Regularly review user and group access, especially as team members join or leave.
• Enable Write Once, Read Many (WORM) Protection: This prevents intentional, accidental, or malicious deletion of backup snapshots until retention expires. It’s a common feature but often not enabled.
• Session Management: Configure web session inactivity timeouts and session limits for both web UI and SSH access.
• Encryption: Enable data encryption at rest (at the highest possible level, like cluster or storage pool) and in flight (using TLS). Manage encryption keys securely, ideally by exporting them to an external Key Management System (KMS).
• Continuous Monitoring & Posture Scoring: Centralize logging (syslog, SNMP) to a SIEM (e.g., Splunk). Leverage built-in security posture scores offered by data protection platforms to gauge your configuration against vendor best practices.
• XDR & SOAR Integration: Collaborate with your security teams to feed backup alerts and events into their Extended Detection and Response (XDR) and Security Orchestration, Automation, and Response (SOAR) systems for event correlation and automated response.
• Two-Person Approval Rule (Quorum/Four-Eyes Authorization): Implement this for critical operations on backup data, requiring approval from a secondary user or team before an action can be performed (e.g., a restore from a cyber vault or cluster-level changes).
• Software & Firmware Updates: Regularly apply software and firmware updates, including critical security patches, to your data protection platforms.
• Disable Support Channel by Default: Only enable remote support access when actively working with the vendor’s support team on an active case.
• Login Banners: Implement a login banner for both UI and shell access to inform users of terms and conditions and real-time monitoring.

The Evolution of Data Protection: A Platform Approach

Modern data protection has shifted from mere backup and restore to a comprehensive platform approach that integrates security at its core. This aligns with cybersecurity frameworks like NIST, encompassing protection, detection, discovery, recovery, and response.

Key capabilities now integrated into these platforms include:

• Threat Detection and Analysis: Beyond basic anomaly detection (monitoring change rates, bulk modifications, file extension changes, and data entropy), advanced threat detection leverages Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) to search for specific malware or ransomware hashes within backup snapshots. These can be built-in or use third-party threat feeds and even custom YARA rules.
• Data Classification: This identifies the severity and criticality of data impacted by an attack, classifying it according to compliance regulations like HIPAA or GDPR. It often leverages machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to understand content context. This insight can help prevent data exfiltration by integrating with security platforms like Zscaler to block sensitive data from leaving the environment.
• Cyber Vaulting (Logical Air-Gapped Copy): This involves storing a “golden copy” of your data in an isolated, off-premise environment, typically managed by the data protection provider in a hyperscaler like AWS or Azure. It leverages object lock for indelible immutability, offers simplified cloud-based setup, enforces clear administrative separation of duties, supports policy-driven automation, and allows for defining data transfer windows to logically sever connections outside of defined periods. The two-person approval rule also applies here for critical recoveries.

Cyber Recovery: Preparing for the Inevitable

When a cyber event occurs, it’s a team sport.

• Engage Security Teams and External Experts: Partner with your internal security teams who manage XDR/SOAR environments. Immediately contact your backup vendor’s cyber response team. Consider having external security experts, like Mandiant, on retainer for additional insight and incident response services.
• Identify Clean Points in Time: Leverage anomaly and threat detection within your data protection solution to pinpoint the last known good, malware-free backup. Consider extending retention for these clean backups.
• Establish a Trusted Recovery Process:
  • Clean Room / Isolated Recovery Environment: Pre-create an isolated recovery environment (on-prem or cloud-based) well in advance of an incident. This is where compromised systems can be safely restored, analyzed, and cleaned before reintroduction to production.
  • Digital Jump Bag: Prepare a centralized toolkit for recovery, including ISOs, security software for additional scanning, configuration files, and critical documentation.
  • Prioritize Recovery: Have an up-to-date application map that outlines critical systems, their dependencies, and maximum acceptable outage times (MAOs) to align with recovery time objectives (RTOs).
  • Leverage Automation & Orchestration: Utilize APIs, pre-defined scripts, and vendor-specific recovery workflows (like Zerto’s runbooks) to automate recovery processes, especially for complex multi-system restorations.
• Post-Incident Analysis: Conduct a thorough root cause analysis with the help of your backup vendor and external security experts to identify the infection method and neutralize gaps. Evaluate response times, data loss, and system resilience, then update incident response playbooks and backup policies as needed.

The Importance of Restore Testing: Proving Your Resilience

Organizations often overlook consistent and comprehensive restore testing.

• Test Regularly and Comprehensively: Don’t just test simple systems; include complex applications, always-on availability groups, and failover clusters. Test from all repositories: local disk, replication targets, and especially your cyber vault.
• Validate RPOs and RTOs: Ensure your backup frequency aligns with your Recovery Point Objectives and that your infrastructure can meet your Recovery Time Objectives, especially for large datasets.
• Staff Preparedness: Keep IT teams familiar with recovery procedures. Store recovery documentation offline or in secure, unimpacted locations (e.g., physical DR binders).
• Demonstrate Compliance: Documented proof of successful restore capabilities is crucial for regulatory and audit requirements. Many new data protection platforms offer built-in reporting for test recoveries.

By implementing these foundational security measures, leveraging next-generation data protection platforms, and meticulously preparing for recovery, IT leaders can move beyond traditional backup to build true data resilience that not only secures and detects but also ensures rapid and clean recovery from the most complex cyberattacks.