Ransomware victims incurred a total of $49.2 million in losses during 2021 – and that figure is based on incidents reported to the U.S. FBI alone. No region in the world or industry is impervious, and creative and sophisticated attackers are continuously innovating, making ransomware attacks a priority to address not just from an IT standpoint, but at the level of the executive board. For IT, this means new scrutiny on data protection practices and technologies, with a focus on enabling cyber resiliency.
Data protection – that is, backup, operational recovery, and disaster recovery – technologies have always been used to protect and enable recoverability of data, and in turn applications and business services. Data protection must now also help to prevent and detect cyber-attacks. This means integrating analytics capabilities across what the core functions of data protection have now become – data protection and recovery, alongside cyber-attack prevention and detection. Specifically, IT Operations requires next-generation analytics and machine learning capabilities to meet the very difficult tasks of keeping pace with evolving threat vectors and vulnerabilities and mitigating the impact of cyber-attacks.
Current Attack Methods
Attackers use several methods in order to gain access to the IT and data environments. Prevalently, they actively seek vulnerabilities in the IT infrastructure including unpatched or unsecured infrastructure and vulnerable remote desktop protocols or virtual private networks (VPNs). The shift to multi-cloud and containerized and microservices architectures makes this a particular problem because new vulnerabilities are introduced as bad actors are looking for easy access points into the IT environment. Adoption of multi-cloud environments introduces shared networks and integration with public cloud services. The shift to microservices architectures increases the number of application programming interfaces (APIs), as well as the number container resources that are difficult to monitor and control due to their fluid, almost ephemeral nature.
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