, 18 May 2021

Having an effective backup and restore plan in place is the simplest solution against ransomware attacks

In mid-May 2021, the eastern part of the United States faced major gasoline shortages as a result of a ransomware attack against Colonial Pipeline.

This isn’t the first major ransomware attack to disrupt people’s daily lives. And it certainly won’t be the last.

At the same time, AXA, a global insurance company, recently said it will stop writing cyber-insurance policies in France that reimburse customers for payments made to ransomware criminals. To underscore how serious a threat ransomware is, AXA reportedly fell victim to a ransomware attack nearly a week after their announcement.

Both of these serve as reminders that all businesses face the threat of ransomware attacks every hour of every day and that there isn’t a simple or cheap solution to a successful ransomware attack...

...unless, that is, you have an effective backup and restore plan.

In our recent World Backup Day posting, we talked about how you should think of backups as a critical part of your ransomware protection strategy. An effective backup and restore plan can enable you to recover from a ransomware attack quickly and not have to worry about questions like, “Do I pay the ransom?”. As a reminder, Avast, global law enforcement agencies and cybersecurity insurance providers all strongly recommend against paying the ransom in a ransomware incident. An effective backup and restore plan can enable you to respond to a ransomware attack by restoring your affected systems and moving on without paying the ransom.

With these latest ransomware incidents and the recent launch of Avast Business Cloud Backup in the Avast Business Hub, we want to highlight specifically how you can develop and implement an effective anti-ransomware backup and restore plan in just a few minutes. 

Avast Business Hub consolidates a number of critical security services for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). In addition to endpoint protection, patch management, and remote access and support solutions, Avast Business Hub now also features Avast Cloud Backup. 

This new service adds backup and restore capability to the Business Hub which you can use to safeguard your business’ and customers’ most critical data as well as ensure business continuity by protecting devices with an automated backup process that’s easy to deploy and manage from anywhere.

Avast Business Cloud Backup features:

• All in the cloud with no hardware requirements
• Direct-to-cloud endpoint backup solution that protects Windows business devices including laptops and desktops, as well as servers – an all-in-one solution 
• Unlimited data retention and version history
• Unlimited number of devices
• Centralized management and deployment from the Avast Business Hub 

Avast Business Cloud Backup is sold as a storage-based subscription in 100GB increments. Follow these steps to get started:

1. Purchase a backup plan for Avast Business Hub
2. Define a backup policy
3. Deploy an agent to business/customer devices
4. Manage and monitor your backup plan remotely

Once you’ve set up Avast Business Cloud Backup, you can define a backup policy that will best protect your data in case of a ransomware attack (or other catastrophic event like a natural disaster, lost or stolen device among others). In general we would recommend that you do a full backup of your systems every day and backup your critical data directories every hour.

After you’ve established and implemented a backup policy, you should be sure to do a test restore to verify that the backups are working as you expect them to. You don’t want to discover that you’ve missed critical directories in your backup plan after a ransomware attack.

With an effective, reliable and proven backup plan in place, you’re all set. Hopefully, you will never need to use it. But if you find your organization experiences a ransomware attack, you can (and should) turn to your Avast Cloud Backup as your first destination to recover from the attack and get back to work.

You can read more in our Avast Cloud Backup data sheet. Also, if you should find yourself a victim of ransomware, you can also check out our Free Ransomware Decryption Tools.