Ransomware attacks are one of the most serious cybersecurity threats, with severe consequences for any organization that fall victim, and have become more sophisticated than ever.

The attack against ChangeHealth earlier this year, for instance, cost more than $872 million, tied up thousands of hours of employees’ time and disrupted operations at hospitals and pharmacies for over a week. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The full impact of this attack is still being felt and will continue to reverberate.

Organizations have to be on high alert to make sure their business-critical data is always protected and that they remain operational without impacting customers — even in the event of an attack.

To stay future-proof, organizations are beginning to realize the value of adopting a new way of protecting data assets, known as a cyber resilience approach.

Three reasons to re-evaluate your data security model

Three recent technology developments have turned standard cybersecurity measures on their head.

1. AI is empowering criminals to increase the volume and precision of their attacks. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre noted the increased effectiveness, speed and sophistication that AI will give attackers. The year after ChatGPT was released, phishing activity increased 1,265%, and successful ransomware attacks rose 95%.

2. Organizations must watch for “immutability-washing.” In other words, just because something purports to be immutable doesn’t mean it really is. Truly ransomware-proof security is not what most “immutable” storage solutions are offering. Some solutions use periodic snapshots to make data immutable, but that creates periods of vulnerability. Some solutions don’t offer immutability at the architecture level – just at the API level. But immutability at the software level isn’t enough; it opens the door for attackers to evade the system’s defenses.

Attackers are getting better at exploiting the vulnerabilities of flawed immutable storage. To create a truly immutable system, organizations must deploy solutions that prevent deletion and overwriting of data at the foundational level.

3. The rise in exfiltration attacks needs addressing. Today's ransomware attackers not only encrypt data; they now exfiltrate that data. Then they threaten to publish or sell it unless you pay a ransom. Data exfiltration is part of 91% of ransomware attacks today.

Immutably alone can't stop exfiltration attacks because they don't rely on changing, deleting or encrypting data to demand a ransom. To defeat data exfiltration, you need a multi-layered approach that secures sensitive data everywhere it exists. Most providers have not hardened their offerings against common exfiltration techniques.

Moving beyond immutability: The five key layers of end-to-end cyber resilience

Relying solely on immutable backups won’t protect data against all the current and emerging ransomware perils. It’s time for organizations to move beyond basic immutability and adopt a more holistic security paradigm of end-to-end cyber resilience.

This paradigm includes the strongest type of true immutability. But it doesn't stop there; it includes strong, multi-layer defenses to defeat data exfiltration and other emergent threats such as AI-enhanced malware. This entails creating security measures at every level to shut down as many threat types as possible and achieve end-to-end cyber resilience. These levels include:

API – Amazon shook up the storage industry when it introduced its immutability API (AWS S3 Object Lock) six years ago. It offers the highest protection against encryption-based ransomware attacks and creates a default interface for common data security apps. In addition, the S3 API’s granular control over data immutability enables compliance with the strictest data retention requirements. For the modern storage system, these capabilities are must-haves.

Data – Stopping data exfiltration is the goal here. Anywhere sensitive data exists, organisations need to deploy strict data security measures. To make sure backup data can’t be accessed or intercepted by unauthorized parties, what’s needed is a hardened storage solution that has many layers of security at the data level. That includes broad cryptographic and identity and access management (IAM) features.

Storage – Should an advanced hacker get root access to a storage server, they can evade API-level protections and gain unfettered access to all the server’s data. There are sophisticated AI-powered ways to defeat authentication that can make attacks like this harder to defeat. A storage system must make sure data is safe – even if a bad actor finds their way into the deepest level of an organization’s storage system.

Next-gen solutions address this scenario with distributed erasure coding technology. It makes data at the storage level unintelligible to hackers and not worth exfiltrating. It also enables an IT team to completely reconstruct any data that was lost in an attack or corrupted – even if several drives or a whole server gets destroyed.

Geographic –When data is stored in one location, it’s especially susceptible to attack. Bad actors try to infiltrate several organisations at once by attacking data centres or other high-value targets. This raises the odds of actually getting the ransom. Today’s storage recommendations include having many offsite backups, geographically separate, to defend data from vulnerabilities at one site.

Architecture – The security of storage architecture determines the security of the storage system. That’s why cyber resilience must focus on getting rid of vulnerabilities located in the core system architecture. When a ransomware attack is in process, one of the first things an attacker tries to do is to escalate their privileges. If they can do that, then they can deactivate or otherwise bypass immutability protections at the API level.

If a standard file system or another intrinsically mutable architecture is the foundation of an organization's storage system, its data is left out in the open. The risk of ransomware attacks at the architecture level increases if a storage system is founded on a vulnerable architecture, given the explosion of malware and hacking tools enhanced by AI.

Go beyond immutable: Staying ahead of AI-fueled ransomware

AI-powered ransomware attacks are on the rise, rendering many traditional approaches to protect backup data ineffective. Immutability is a must, but it’s not enough to combat the increasing sophistication of cyber criminals – and not only that, but most so-called immutable solutions really aren’t. What’s needed today is end-to-end cyber resilience that addresses five key levels to help organizations future-proof their data security strategy.

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