It seems like it’s almost every day that the news reports another major company outage and as a result, the massive operational, financial and reputational consequences experienced, both short- and long-term. Widespread systemic outages first come to mind when considering disasters and threats to business and IT service continuity. But oftentimes, it’s the overlooked, “smaller” threats that regularly occur. Human error, equipment failure, power outages, malicious threats and data corruption can too bring an entire organization to a complete standstill.

There’s no end to ransomware in sight. It’s a simple enough attack — install malware, encrypt data/system, and ask for the ransom — so why aren’t we stopping ransomware?  Security vendors are keenly aware of the issue, as well as the attack vectors and methods, but can’t seem to stay a step ahead, causing ransomware to grow from $1 billion in damages in 2016 to an estimated $5 billion in 2017. There are two basic reasons ransomware continues to be a “success” for cyber criminals.

Encryption is a great way to keep data secure, but sometimes it can be used against us. Yes, we’re talking about ransomware.

When ransomware enters your systems, usually through a PC, it begins to encrypt your data and can target network-attached storage (NAS), virtualization, online collaboration tools, and even your online backups to render them unusable.

Ransomware attacks are not a fake threat – they are real and increasing day by day. The below insights on ransomware history can help you understand the evolution of its delivery and extortion strategies and be better prepared in case you become the victim of an attack.

Ransomware, locker or crypto-malware, has been around for a long time — decades in fact. Originally, ransomware was an annoyance and a con-trick, but today’s ransomware is considerably different and presents much more of a sophisticated threat to systems and users.

If you were considering becoming a cybercriminal or were perhaps a traditional villain looking to upgrade your skills for the 21^st century, I’m sure your business model of choice would be running a ransomware operation. You would, thanks to the simplicity of platforms like Ransomware as a Service and the willingness of victims to pay ransomware fees, be running a very successful business — albeit an illegal business — in a matter of days or weeks. Such is the ongoing success of ransomware as a means of extorting money from victims.

Monitoring data center performance is an essential part of every IT administrator’s job that shouldn’t be overlooked. There are many avenues you can go down when looking at a tool to help monitor performance, but with Veeam, you can do this with Veeam ONE. Veeam ONE has many capabilities, but one of the most important features is the alarm it triggers when part of your virtual environment isn’t working as it should. Pre-built alarms included in Veeam ONE keep IT administrators up-to-date on the operations and issues occurring in their environment in real-time.

The backup infrastructure is a primary target for attack because all relevant environment data is stored in that one single place. Second, if an attacker wants to destroy data, the backup environment is a good starting point because the backup server has access to pretty much every other important system, such as virtualization platform or storage systems.

There is no question that ransomware attacks are becoming increasingly prevalent. In fact, some have proposed that 2017 is the Year of Ransomware. The WannaCry attack led to the infection of more than 230,000 computers and more recently, the Petya outbreak on June 27, 2017 led to a second global spread of ransomware. While traditional methods of data protection are essential, they are not sufficient.

Traditional data protection strategies have centered around the three foundational components of IT:  people, process and technology. Data protection with people begins with education and a continuous focus on making employees aware of the most ... Read more

Today’s highway robber is a lot more sophisticated and savvy. They take far less risk and turn to the latest technology to extort you out of your money by threatening your valuables. In this case your data, your technology and most probably your computing ability.

Of course, I’m talking now about ransomware, the threat that’s been in the news almost every day for the past couple of months. The tool of choice for the modern highway robber has become headline news around the world with variants such as WannaCry and the more recent Popcorn Time. Organizations around the world have been affected by this ransomware, from the UK National Health Service, through to the Russian Postal Service in the last few ... Read more

Complete visibility within the data center is essential to keeping businesses available 24.7.365. Visibility into the data center allows IT administrators to properly utilize resources, be proactive in troubleshooting issues and run reports on their environment. Veeam allows businesses to remain proactive in monitoring and managing their environment through Veeam ONE. If you haven’t heard about it, you are truly missing out, as it works not only for your Veeam-powered data protection operations, but for entire VMware vSphere and Microsoft Hyper-V environments as well.