Data Backups and Your Cyber Security Strategy

We live in times when we all need to become familiar with the hard truths of cyber security in the 21st century. At SynchroNet, we strongly believe that our clients should be able to clearly understand how today’s cyber threat environment directly affects them, and this is why we often state the following:

* You can’t prevent cyber attacks in the manners we did a couple of decades ago. To a great extent, you have to accept the idea that you will be hacked at some point down the line, which means you need to be prepared to mitigate damage.

* Data protection is not limited to shielding databases with firewalls, malware scanning, and encryption. The data your business relies on can only be as good as its recovery process.

Based on these two hard truths of information security today, it is easy to assume that your data backup strategy is a vital factor in determining business continuity and disaster recovery planning.

Many SynchroNet clients have heard the following analogy from us: If you choose to write an important piece of information on a chalkboard, you have to consider the scenario of someone coming along and erasing it. As long as you copied that information somewhere else besides the chalk board, you should be in good shape; unless, however, you also forgot where you placed that note.

In the history of cybercrime, there have always been hackers interested in business data, but early efforts were mostly limited to corporate espionage. These days, cybercrime gangs are interested in data for financial profit, and this explains the massive rise in ransomware attacks.

Ransomware is a type of cyber attack that can combine the following:

* Data theft
* Blackmail
* Data hijacking
* Ransom demands

There are several variations of ransomware attacks. Some cybercrime gangs share similar modus operandi, but some have developed sophisticated plans of attack that may start with a phishing campaign and continue with SQL injections, password theft, remote code execution, malicious data encryption, and ultimately ransom demands. In the meantime, you are completely locked out of your business data, which you can consider to be completely lost unless you have taken backup precautions.

The bottom line of data protection in 2022 is that it is more crucial than ever. Ransomware attacks are being launched against individuals, small businesses, large corporations, municipalities, and even government agencies. The best strategy to mitigate a ransomware attack is to not only choose the right data backup routine but also make sure the recovery process works smoothly. At SynchroNet, we design data backup systems that adjust to the precise needs of our clients.