The company issuing the warning is Asigra Inc. The organization is touted as a leader in backup and recovery software that delivers comprehensive backup repository cyber protection. They have been awarded Product of the Year Gold winner, three times, by TechTarget for their Enterprise Backup and Recovery Software.

Asigra is currently working to maintain operational continuity, and productive operations, for clients as it responds to these impending threats.

“The organization has observed continuing ransomware attacks across the country and around the world. Malicious actors have adjusted their ransomware tactics over time to include pressuring victims for payment by threatening to release stolen data if they refuse to pay.” stated the US Government’s Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA).

“Malicious actors increasingly use tactics such as deleting system backups, which make restoration and recovery more difficult or infeasible for impacted organizations.”

According to Asigra, most organizations are falling into a false sense of security – assuming that their backup data will be available after a ransomware attack. However, the company is warning that in many recent attacks, the backup data is targeted by the attackers.

Asigra is pointing to these 5 areas as the cyber security ransomware challenges which businesses must address in 2021 to remain in safe operations:

1.            Ransomware Attacks on Kubernetes Containers: The deployment of Kubernetes-based containers is growing rapidly as it allows software to run consistently between computing environments, making it highly portable, productive and ideal for digital transformation. Along with these advantages comes the generation of massive data volumes, making these new environments prime targets for new ransomware variants. Mitigating these attacks will require an industry-wide approach to ensuring the viability of these environments before, during and after such attacks.

2.            Cyber-targeting of SaaS-Based Applications: With the increase in distributed enterprise operations and remote work environments, there will be continued adoption of SaaS-based applications. Beyond the flexible use of these applications, they offer cost, time and scalability advantages in many cases. However, they also create a new data source that is vulnerable to ransomware and must be protected.

3.            AI-Driven Cyberattacks: Artificial intelligence and the technologies that enable it are becoming more advanced. The resulting new capabilities are allowing criminal organizations to conduct more complex and targeted attacks. To counter these more intelligent attacks, organizational defenses must also evolve.

4.            Ransomware Payments to Become Illegal: The US government has expressed intentions to align the payment of cyber ransoms with the support of terrorist organizations and will likely make these payments illegal. It is expected that other nations will enact such laws as well, especially to defend against possible nation-state sponsored actors. Without the ability to retrieve criminally encrypted data or recover properly, ransomware attacks will become business ending events.

5.            Managed Security Service Provider Registration with the Government: The US government will move to require MSPs/MSSPs that provide cybersecurity services to register their organizations with the government, adding more regulations as the ransomware trend continues to accelerate.

Ensuring that viable backup data is available and unharmed is essential to for a business to survive a ransomware attack.  

To make this happen, the organization’s backup infrastructure, including access to backup software controls, must be ensured.

“Organizations need to ready themselves to properly and quickly respond to ransomware attacks regardless of what has been attacked. One way to do this is to make backup data very difficult to hack,” said David Farajun, Chief Executive Officer, Asigra, Inc.

“Regardless of the imposing number of routes that ransomware will take in 2021, having a well-planned response plan to get your systems back up and running in the least amount of time will be critical to ensuring business viability.” Additional details about Asigra’s enhanced data protection suite is available on the company web site https://www.asigra.com.

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