Does Cloud Storage Protect Against Ransomware?

If cloud storage becomes infected with ransomware, it may result in significant damage. A plethora of cyberattacks on the cloud necessitates care by users.

For companies of all sizes, ransomware has been a chronic concern. Corporate entities must examine how ransomware may disrupt cloud-based systems.

Several cloud storage services exist, and various kinds of cloud storage are available. Also, various cloud storage solutions providers will provide many options for file, archive, and object storage.

For this discussion, generic cloud storage will be referred to as cloud storage. The best cloud security services can only help against certain forms of ransomware, and they are not universally implemented across all cloud service providers.

The epidemic known as Ransomware has been around for some time. Some early ransomware versions were simple. Most of the user’s hard disc was unaffected by a ransomware attack.

Back-end servers have become valuable to ransomware writers, who started to understand that critical data is often kept on back-end servers rather than simply on a hard drive. Such, in effect, led to ransomware evolving to encrypt network shares’ contents. A small percentage of today’s ransomware is even specifically created to target particular programs.

As we shall see, although cloud storage is essential, it is not a silver bullet on its own.

Here is how Ransomware Operates and how to keep yourself Protected

On cloud storage, the two critical components are how successful the ransomware assault was and how much data was recovered. The capabilities of ransomware are the first of these variables. Malicious ransomware is not always generated in the same way, just as unaltered cloud storage is not. Cloud storage ransomware is more effective on specific operating systems than others.

The second major issue is the degree of permission the user has been given by IT. Ransomware may compromise a user’s device as long as they have access to it. Ransomware attacks, which encrypt data on network-attached cloud storage, may potentially affect any data accessed by a user’s PC when it is mapped to the cloud. We may state this as an additional way of saying that the ransomware does not care if the data is located locally or remotely. When developing a new damaging technique, attackers make it as destructive as possible.

Companies can assist to prevent ransomware attacks from propagating to cloud storage in one of the most efficient methods possible. Everyone should have access to just the resources required to do their jobs. Companies should ensure that endpoint anti-malware protections are active, and if cloud-based anti-malware is available, then use it.

• Malicious ransomware may infect cloud storage, like many other types of malware.
• We should explore some of the typical methods of cloud storage in order to comprehend how ransomware may infect it.
• It has been estimated that your cloud storage is susceptible to ransomware since it is synchronized with your local data storage.
• You may work on your files locally if you have a Dropbox or OneDrive file sync and sharing solution installed. If you make any modifications to your documents, do they automatically get uploaded to the cloud?
• When ransomware infects your PC, it will encrypt your data locally and share it with the cloud storage.
• Also, in business, cloud storage gateways or other storage tiering solutions serve the same purpose. As its most probable that the ransomware will encrypt the local copy, this data will sync up to the cloud.
• When pointers are present, the item will likely be recalled from the cloud and encrypted, and eventually synced back up to the cloud.

Is Versioning Helpful in the Protection of Your Data?

• The concept behind versioning is that your existing data is unchanging. They are fixed in the present. Therefore any changes that are made will produce a new version.
• In this regard, the encryption assault is, in fact, an advantage since it essentially means a new version of your infected data.
• Even though many cloud storage solutions support versioning, you should double-check to see whether it is enabled since certain cloud storage providers disable versioning.
• Cloud storage should be considered while recovering a network.
• There must be versioning of cloud storage; otherwise, you must witness recovery scenarios where versioning helped.
• After removing the ransomware, can you use the version history to return your local data to the latest known regular version? If you use cloud storage that has data recovery capabilities, your data will be recoverable. No one is entirely infallible.
• When storing data in the cloud, can you distinguish and purge erroneous data and promote the most recent good copy to be the most current version?

Traditional Backup is Less helpful in Ransomware Protection than Cloud Backup

Except for new ransomware threat types, most malware evasion methods circumvent your virus scanner, which employs signature-based detection. Because of this, a comprehensive ransomware protection plan must go beyond obtaining the most recent virus definition and performing frequent data backups.

If your ransomware does not encrypt itself over those few days, weeks, or months, it is conceivable that your infection will go unnoticed. Often, but not always, ransomware affects just a part of an enterprise file system’s content profile. We may not encounter encrypted information as long as most data is outdated. In other words, having just conventional backups means you may recycle those copies before you discover that part of your data has been encrypted.

It is possible to configure a data-aware hybrid cloud storage system to mitigate the effects of ransomware. Before that, it determined whether unusual file access or file modification activity was happening, identified the user account, and let the administrator know with an alert. Furthermore, it allows efficient quarantine and recuperation while avoiding contamination of clean items.

With all the New Cyberattacks, new Security Strategies are Required

There is much interest in government agencies from both the private and public sectors to ensure vulnerabilities exist, and ransomware is a successful tactic for attackers. This means that cyberattacks will be there for a while.

Is cloud storage susceptible to ransomware? Absolutely. Preventing it from occurring means implementing tactics while preparing for the fact that it will happen and devising a plan to recover afterward.