Why Backup Your Data?
In today’s digital age, data is one of the most valuable assets an organization can possess. Compliance fees and reputational damage make the loss of data like financial records, critical business documents, and protected customer information devastating for businesses. This is why data backups are a cornerstone of cybersecurity strategies, ensuring that even in the face of cyber threats, data remains safe and recoverable.
As cyberattacks like data encryption and ransomware became more popular, cybersecurity experts realized the value of having a protected copy of company data not connected to the main system environment. While data backups were originally encouraged as an account keeping reliability practice, they are now crucial in all cybersecurity attack response plans. Data backup systems now serve to augment existing endpoint and perimeter defense tools.
Data backups are useful because companies can replace encrypted, stolen, or missing data with their own information instead of bargaining ransoms with malicious hackers. The key is to keep the data as current as possible while still providing a window of delay to avoid backing up infected files. This has become an area of concern, when organizations look to their dutifully backed-up files to save them from a ransomware nightmare and discover that they have saved malware into this safe environment, ruining the data that was supposed to be problem-free. Beyond this threat, malicious actors have recently begun targeting the data backup processes directly, threatening the source of the most sensitive information and a key tool for the recovery process.
Backup Best Practices
Regulations such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Europe and the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) in the United States mandate the protection and secure storage of data. Regular backups ensure compliance with these regulations, helping organizations avoid hefty fines and legal repercussions. To protect backups and the applications that save these files, Gartner recommends these protection features:
Zero-Trust Security Principles – Continuously assess risk and context, ensuring that users have the explicit authentication and authority to operate within the data backup system.
Multifactor Authentication and Privileged Access Management – Compromised backups are more often born of compromised credentials than software vulnerabilities. Identify access management is crucial to protect access to such sensitive information.
Multiple Copies of Backup Data – Follow the 3-2-1-0 Rule: three copies of data on two different types of storage, one copy off-site with 0 backup errors. This method prioritizes no backup errors to ensure the copies kept will be completely useful in the event of an emergency.
Preventative Scanning and Analysis for Malware Detection – Harden data backup applications by ensuring the data being stored in these safe havens hasn’t been corrupted. Early detection avoids infecting crucial stored files with the same malware wreaking havoc on the existing files.
The CodeHunter Solution
The caveat with malware detection is that traditional data backup systems use the same anti-malware steps the connected protection platform deploys, typically limited to signature analysis of known threats. That means malware that has already escaped detection and remediation on the main system will be unknowingly saved to the data backups as well. CodeHunter’s in-depth behavioral analysis breaks down suspicious and malicious capabilities at the binary level, detecting malware that hides from existing cybersecurity solutions. The automated threat hunting engine scans files at speed and at scale, flagging the threats in your system and providing actionable intelligence to aid security teams in their remediation process. As malware detection and analysis becomes the backbone of secure systems, use a platform that finds threats invisible to traditional security solutions. Find out how CodeHunter can harden your security posture here.
