Every time I help a customer recover from ransomware I ask myself what actually made the difference. After a few years the answer is surprisingly short. Three things: immutable backups, a bad network and a bad memory.<\/p>\n
Immutable backups first. A backup the attacker can reach is not a backup, it is just another target. Modern ransomware groups go for the backup servers before they encrypt anything. So make sure at least one copy can\u00b4t be changed or deleted, not even by a domain admin, for a set number of days. Offline tape works. So does storage with a retention lock.<\/p>\n
Then the bad network. I can\u00b4t count the times a slow, forgotten line to a branch office or a badly configured replication link stopped the ransomware from reaching everything. Nobody planned it, but it worked.<\/p>\n
And the bad memory. This is my favourite. More than once the whole recovery has been saved because someone suddenly remembered: \u2018Wait, didn\u00b4t we build a lab with a copy of AD on that other cloud service two years ago?\u2019 And there it was. Old, forgotten and not connected to anything. A perfectly good domain controller to start from.<\/p>\n
Now, I\u00b4m not recommending bad networks and bad memory as a strategy. But they tell you what works: copies the attacker can\u00b4t reach.<\/p>\n
Build that on purpose instead of by accident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Every time I help a customer recover from ransomware I ask myself what actually made the difference. After a few years the answer is surprisingly short. Three things: immutable backups, a bad network and a bad memory. Immutable backups first. A backup the attacker can reach is not a backup, it is just another target. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,13],"tags":[55,54,42,56],"class_list":["post-1201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-security-architecture","category-technology","tag-active-directory","tag-backup","tag-ransomware","tag-recovery"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowmoor.se\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowmoor.se\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowmoor.se\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowmoor.se\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowmoor.se\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1201"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crowmoor.se\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1229,"href":"https:\/\/crowmoor.se\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201\/revisions\/1229"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crowmoor.se\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowmoor.se\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crowmoor.se\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}