Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2021. Read them in this 13th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
How to stay ahead of cyber criminals and protect your data
By Jim McGann, Vice President Marketing & Business
Development, Index Engines
For one reason or another, many people are already looking
forward to ringing in the new year. Cyber criminals will be among them. They
had a banner 2020, wreaking havoc on data centers and costing the world
trillions of dollars. The business of ransomware is booming to a point that
CyberSecurity Ventures predicts an attack every 11 seconds in 2021.
Businesses, while already navigating more remote employees
and changing commerce trends, will also need to account for increased cyber
threats.
With certain patterns already developing, data integrity
company Index Engines makes the following predictions for the effects of ransomware
in 2021.
Cyber criminals will concentrate attacks on the most
critical industries, including healthcare and manufacturing organizations
While financial services will always be a target, they often
have more infrastructure invested in protecting their corporate data assets. Cyber
criminals want easy money and will heavily pursue less guarded and more
vulnerable industries.
The global health crisis has already made healthcare a prime
candidate for delivering ransoms. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security
Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of
Health and Human Services released an advisory to the Healthcare and the Public
Health Sector in October about RYUK attacks. These, unfortunately, will
continue.
Manufacturing organizations have built out an IT
infrastructure that relies heavily on networks of communication with
suppliers. These internet-enabled
networks increase their vulnerability and makes them easier targets.
Attacks will find more sophisticated ways to get into
your data center
Cyber criminals are deploying advanced technology, including
machine learning, to aid them in penetrating security defenses. We have seen attacks in 2020 that hid inside
virtual machines and cache copies of data to circumvent traditional security
software.
In 2021 you can be assured that cyber criminals will ramp up
their game and find new and sophisticated methods of attacking
organizations. This presents an
overwhelming challenge to real-time security solutions that will struggle to
keep up.
What can be done? Organizations need tools with advanced analytics
to examine the content of their data, including critical infrastructure, as a
last line of defense. You can be assured
that at some point in 2021 you will be attacked, so check your data's integrity
to ensure it is protected.
CISOs are going to focus more time and budget on
recovering from an attack
Cyber attacks are becoming more intelligent. Criminals are spending increased dwell time
to determine how to cause the most destruction and also looking for the most
sensitive content that when stolen will cause the most harm to an organization,
resulting in higher ransom requests. Ransoms
at recent attacks are skyrocketing to the tens of millions of dollars. Organizations will find themselves spending
significant budget recovering from these attacks, including man hours dedicated
to recovering their business operations.
Forensic analysis reporting will become critical in
understanding the who, what, where and when of an attack. Using advanced reports to inspect the data
and understand the evidence of what occurred will streamline the recovery
process and allow an organization to minimize business down time.
Cyberattacks will put a renewed focus on data governance
In 2020 cyber criminals added a new tactic to their
arsenal. They started to steal sensitive
data and publish it on the internet for the world to see: sensitive patient
records, legal contracts, intellectual property. This content will cause much harm and embarrassment
to any company.
With cyber attacks now becoming data breaches, organizations
will need to ramp up their data governance initiatives. They will need to know
what sensitive data exists, where it is, and how they can secure and protect
it. Otherwise they will be facing fines
due to new regulatory initiatives including the GDPR in the EU.
Backup infrastructure will look very different and see a
noticeable transformation
Backup has not seen a lot of innovation over the last
decade. There was tape and then disk. Much of the analyst conversations end
here. "It's just backup, another copy of data." It's been left to accumulate in
the mountains for decades with little management or thought.
But cyberattacks have generated a renewed focus on backup. It's
often the only solution for recovering from an attack. And there are newer,
better backup solutions that have expanded into cyber recovery solutions that
provide sophisticated analytics, smarter machine learning, and isolated air-gaps
for added security with confidence. These are currently being utilized by early
adopters and organizations that have already gone through an attack. These
better backup/cyber solutions are quickly becoming the industry standard.
Staying Ahead of Cyberattacks
CyberSense, from data integrity experts Index Engines,
provides advanced data analysis software that scans backup data to check
integrity, monitors files to identify changes indicative of cyberattack, and
provides forensic reporting to diagnose and recover from corruption.
CyberSense uses a combination of full-content-based
analytics and machine learning to detect if an attack has occurred. If attack vectors are identified, CyberSense
provides forensic tools to diagnose and recover, including reports on files that
were impacted so they can be replaced with the last known good version to
ensure business operations return to normal with minimal downtime. CyberSense
is available through Index Engines and has been integrated in the Dell EMC
Cyber Recovery isolated vault solution.
Beyond CyberSense, Index Engines delivers an extensive
information management product family that supports management and governance
of content with petabyte-class scalability and performance.
Learn more at www.indexengines.com/cybersense
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About the Author
Jim McGann, Vice President Marketing & Business
Development, Index Engines
Jim McGann has extensive experience with the eDiscovery and
Information Management in the Fortune 2000 sector. Before joining Index Engines
in 2004, he worked for leading software firms, including Information Builders
and the French based engineering software provider Dassault Systemes.
In recent years he has worked for technology-based start-ups
that provided financial services and information management solutions. Prior to
Index Engines, Jim was responsible for the business development of Scopeware at
Mirror Worlds Technologies, the knowledge management software firm founded by
Dr. David Gelernter of Yale University. Jim graduated from Villanova University
with a degree in Mechanical Engineering.
He is a frequent writer and speaker on the topics of big data,
backup tape remediation, electronic discovery and records management.