Is a Deep Cover “Cyber Spy” Lurking in Your Data Infrastructure?

What enterprise wants to have its data held for ransom because of a ransomware attack? The answer is none, but most of the time enterprise organizations don’t even know that a cybercriminal has infiltrated their data center, network, storage, and servers, compromising their data infrastructure. Cyberattacks are so difficult to detect that the number of days of a data breach is up to 287 days – from the initial incursion to resolution of the attack. 

Unawareness is not bliss. IT teams often don’t really understand how hard it is to detect ransomware and malware, as if a highly sophisticated, deep cover “spy” is present, either planting the seeds to inflict damage or stealing your organization blind. 

I was recently talking to one of Infinidat’s top channel partners, Stan Wysocki, President at Mark III Systems, about this exact issue. Stan was saying that even if a company has a high level of security on its primary storage, having inadequate cyber resilience safeguards on its secondary storage can leave the business vulnerable to cyberattacks. 

To effectively execute these cyberattacks, such as ransomware, cyber criminals have realized they need to control not just your essential business data sitting on our primary storage, but also the valuable data sitting in your secondary storage and backup repositories. If they do not control both, then any enterprise under attack could just do a recovery from their backup datasets and ignore the request for ransom.  

Thus, being prepared encompasses having cyber-resilient backup and secondary storage as a critical component of your enterprise’s corporate cybersecurity strategy. Cyber terrorists

attack the backup and the storage that houses the backup solutions, too.  A company could back up bad data and not know it. 

Stan made an excellent point when he said, “We need to help more end-user customers understand how storage fits into cybersecurity. Sure, it’s important to protect networks, servers and the edge, but enterprise customers cannot forget about securing enterprise-class storage.”

I couldn’t agree more. I was telling Stan, “It is critical for CIOs, CISOs and other IT decision-makers to make sure that storage is incorporated into a company’s comprehensive, corporate cybersecurity strategy. If more companies do not take cyber resilience seriously in 2022 and beyond, the price they will pay for cyberattacks will be devastating.”

In a Fortune 500 survey of CEOs in mid-2021, 66% of the CEOs said the #1 threat to their businesses in the next three years is cybersecurity. Similarly, in a KPMG CEO survey in March 2021, CEOs also said cybersecurity was their #1 concern. 

They have good reasons. Cybercrime damages cost the world $6 trillion in 2021, and the figure is projected to rise to $10.5 trillion annually by 2025. Ransomware, which attacks companies between as often as every 14 seconds, is costing enterprises $20 billion per year. The attack surface has broadened significantly over the past couple of years. Reports in the media have exposed the impact of these kinds of cyberattacks, such as the Colonial Pipeline incident, the attack on the Irish Healthcare System, and the attack on the famous America football team the San Francisco Forty-niners.  But the reality is that most attacks never get publicly reported. 

To address this critical issue, Infinidat is partnering with more than 500 channel partners, who are among the best IT solution providers in the world. Infinidat developed InfiniSafe® technology to bring a new level of enterprise cyber resilience to our mutual customers. 

We have expanded the InfiniGuard® platform with the InfiniSafe technology to include immutable snapshots, logical local and remote air gapping, and fenced/isolated networks uniquely in the same platform. The fenced/isolated network provides a safe location to provide forensic analysis of backup datasets to identify a copy of the data that is free from malware or ransomware and can be safely restored. 

Once a backup dataset without malware or ransomware has been identified, the data can be recovered, regardless of the size of the dataset, in minutes and made fully available to the backup software for restoration.  No other vendor can claim usability of the backup dataset in 15-30 minutes.

The comprehensive cyber resilience capabilities of InfiniSafe technology make a real difference. Because of it, partners, like, Stan can sleep well tonight, knowing that their customers with InfiniGuard are well-protected.

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