Assureon’s built-in resistance to file tampering or destruction gives you real-world protection against malware and ransomware attacks.
Among all cyber threats, ransomware attacks are some of the most damaging. They spread rapidly across networks, are extremely difficult to remove, and lock you out of critical files until a ransom is paid. Without verified, unaffected copies of the infected data—which traditional backup systems often can’t guarantee—victims are often left with few options for recovery.
Of all the cybercriminal threats out there, being attacked by ransomware is among the most devastating. It spreads quickly throughout your network, is a nightmare to remove from your machines, and makes any encrypted files inaccessible until you pay the ransom. Unless you have copies of those infected files that you absolutely know to be untouched by the ransomware (and conventional backup solutions simply cannot assure that), you are basically out of luck.
In a nutshell, ransomware extortionists attack your computer network with malware that encrypts every file, and then demands a large ransom payment to a “darknet” site before the decryption key is provided. If you don’t promptly send payment, the criminals threaten to delete the decryption key and all your encrypted data will be lost forever. Usually the crooks supply the key after payment is received, but like any other extortionist, they may make further demands or just cut off further communication altogether.
Typically, however, they will send the decryption key, and this is why so many organizations simply suck it up and send the payment. Cybersecurity Ventures has predicted and others have corroborated that 2022 hit $8 trillion in cybercrime costs for 2025 are predicted to be at $10.5 trillion. These staggering costs are just the tip of the iceberg compared to the lost productivity and all-too-frequently lost data that result from a ransomware attack.
And the situation’s getting worse: With the potential for such massive profits, cybercriminals can afford to pay highly-skilled programmers to create thousands of new types of ransomware attacks every month—which makes detecting them much more difficult. Ransomware has become a major industry, ranking number one in growth rate among illegal enterprises.
Some industry pundits have taken a “blame the victim” attitude, claiming that common ransomware targets (hospitals, schools and police stations) are vulnerable because “they all lack sophisticated cybersecurity like anti-virus, backup, and disaster recovery.” But we think those claims are unwarranted, as virtually all of the customers we’ve spoken to have implemented at least two of these cybersecurity measures.
Here’s the real issue: Anti-malware products are not infallible, and when they fail, conventional computer architectures readily allow data corruption by malware that masquerades as the authorized user. We’re going to talk about several common-sense precautions you can take to combat this, but for cases where those precautions aren’t enough, we’ll show you how Assureon our hardened archive technology—blocks attempts by malware to delete or corrupt your valuable data.
HOW ASSUREON PROTECTS YOU AGAINST RANSOMWARE
Assureon was purpose-built to be a secure, hardened archiver for important, unstructured data. Delivering a higher level of integrity and assurance than conventional servers and storage, Assureon is designed to provide a superset of the storage requirements of compliance regulations like HIPAA, SEC17a-4, Dodd-Frank, FDA 22, Sarbanes Oxley, and PCI. It is also optimized for Data Security Posture Management (DSPM). In other words, Assureon enables you to meet these stringent security standards... and exceed them.
By deploying Assureon, you’ll achieve these two major benefits:
- Assureon provides protection against unauthorized or accidental changes or deletions of your files, by people, viruses or ransomware that have escalated to superuser privileges or have compromised your Assureon Directory server in some way. Even when organizations supplement their conventional storage environments with a document management package or PACS archive, their security still ultimately relies on protecting the passwords of admins and authorized users—and by extension, the computers and BYOD devices they use - as most malware exploits attempt to gain superuser status.
- Because Assureon resists attempts by privileged accounts to change or modify files, it helps remove the temptation for authorized users to make unauthorized changes; those users will be unsuccessful and they will be caught. Any attempt to overwrite a file merely creates a new version. By default all versions are stored, but version-limiting options enable you to protect against DDoS attacks that attempt to consume all of your available storage space with unwanted and corrupt versions.
- Assureon includes auditing, integrity, and self-healing features that let you easily implement multi-decade retention times. It keeps two copies of each file in independently-protected object stores, and applies two cryptographic hashes (think of these as unique digital fingerprints of the file contents) that are separately stored in a hardened blockchain internal to the device. Additionally, Assureon issues a globally-unique consecutive serial number to each file so that it can be tracked throughout its lifetime. These techniques protect against bit rot, silent data corruption and software errors—invisible issues that can cause huge problems with your files.
- Even if you’re using modern hardware, your data can sometimes gets lost or corrupted. The important thing is to catch it immediately, report it, and fix it. Assureon’s unique self-authenticating object replicator will not replicate corruption. Here’s why: Approximately every 90 days, each Assureon node performs a thorough audit by checking serial numbers in sequence to ensure that all files are present, all match their previously stored hashes and all replication stores are exactly equal. This gives you positive assurance that all your files are there, and all are readable at all DR locations.
- A welcome side effect of Assureon’s data authenticity and integrity features is that organizations are widely choosing to deploy Assureon for primary storage offload; that certainly makes sense, as it takes better care of files than the traditional server/backup paradigm.
When ransomware gets past your defenses, it obtains or generates a secret encryption key which is used to encrypt every file on your local device and any mounted (or possibly unmounted) network shares. Typically, those files are also renamed to something like “mydocument.doc.encrypted.” But any of your files that have been protected by Assureon will remain safely untouched inside its archive.
Potentially new versions of files will start to be ingested by Assureon until the ransomware is detected and removed. Then recovery is extremely fast— Assureon gives you the option to use tiny shortcuts (sometimes called “stubs”) that represent your undamaged files to restore them to your production servers. Assureon overwrites whatever garbage the ransomware has left on those servers, and does so at the rate of thousands of files per second. During the natural course of business, your most frequently-used files will re-inflate for faster access and the rest will remain as shortcuts. Assureon even gives you a unique, higher-performance option called “Virtual Shortcuts” which effectively requires zero time to recover files to your production servers.
Summing up, let’s be clear: Assureon was architected from the beginning around the knowledge that attempts at corruption or deletion can come from anyone, anywhere and at any time. This includes from ransomware. That’s why Assureon simply rejects every such attempt, regardless of whether it’s from a virus, ransomware, spyware, user mistakes, software error - or a new threat that hasn’t even been invented yet.
