Ransomware attacks are on the rise, impacting businesses across the globe in 2021. According to research, 40% of businesses suffered a ransomware attack last year. We can only expect this percentage to rise in 2022, as ransomware becomes the go-to tool for hackers.
Ransomware is one of the most disruptive forms of cyber-attacks out there. It causes immediate damage to your business, locking you out of your files and grinding operations to a standstill. To get access back, you’ll need to pay a costly ransom in cryptocurrency.
Even if you pay, though, there’s no guarantee you’ll get your money back. Cyber-criminals aren’t known for their ethics. In fact, we’re seeing more ransomware attacks where businesses pay to unlock their files only to find that the hackers have copied all of their data – and are requesting more money in exchange for not making the files public.
Ransomware isn’t the only threat companies need to contend with. There’s also the increased risk of cloud security breaches. Today, more and more companies are moving workloads to the cloud. However, securing the cloud continues to be a challenge. In line with this, IDC found that 9 in 10 companies experienced a cloud security breach in the last year and a half.
Ransomware and cloud data breaches are both huge risks to your business’s cybersecurity – and they become an even bigger risk when you combine them together.
What do we mean by this? Well, increasingly, we’re seeing sneaky hackers target company cloud environments with ransomware. The worst of these attacks involves ransomware in cloud storage. When this happens, companies can lose access to precious data backups for good.
How Can Ransomware Get Into the Cloud?
Cloud environments are essentially privatized pockets of space that are hosted on the Internet. If your cloud environment is poorly configured, it could be left exposed to the public, making it easy for hackers to find it and deploy ransomware.
Another major way cybercriminals access the cloud is through credentials compromise. If your employees use easily guessable passwords or re-use the same password for lots of accounts, a hacker could happily stumble upon their login details for your Amazon, Microsoft or Google storage accounts and then infect them with ransomware.
How Can I Prevent Ransomware From Harming My Cloud Storage Environment
The two main causes of ransomware in the cloud are misconfigurations and poor access controls. With these reasons in mind, here are some things you can do to improve cloud security and reduce the likelihood of ransomware in the cloud.
- Start using the principle of zero trust: Zero trust is an increasingly popular approach to security centred around the idea of constantly verifying that users are who they say they are through solutions like multi-factor authentication and user behavior analytics. Zero trust goes hand in hand with the principle of least privilege, whereby users are only given access to the resources they need to do their jobs. Ensure that your cloud applications function on the principle of least privilege.
- Keep track of people’s moves in your company: When an employee leaves your company, you need to shut down their email and cloud accounts as a matter of urgency. If left available and unused, hackers could break into these accounts and use them as the basis for attacks.
- Prevent misconfigurations: Your cloud storage should never be left open to the public. However, given the complexity of cloud configurations, it’s far too easy for this to accidentally happen. To that end, you should put a strategy in place to monitor your cloud environments and ensure they are private by default. If you’re not sure how to get started, speak to us. We offer dedicated cloud security services and can help you manage your configuration policies.
- Deploy automated tools: Major cloud service providers offer plenty of tools to help you with malware and virus scanning in the cloud. While these tools may cost a little extra, they’re well worth deploying to bolster your cloud security.
- Make backups of your cloud backups: If you handle particularly sensitive data that you can’t afford to lose, we advise making offline backups of your cloud backups. That way, if ransomware gets into your cloud environment, you won’t need to worry about forking out for a ransom.
Be Proactive About the Ransomware Cloud Threat
The threat of ransomware is not going away. With the rise of ransomware-as-a-service, we expect ransomware attacks to skyrocket this year – and many hackers will target the cloud.
To best protect your company and your data, you need to take a proactive approach. If you’re not sure how best to protect the cloud, don’t let a lack of internal expertise stop you. Work with a managed IT security provider like us. We can help you make security a competitive differentiator in your business.
Protect Your Cloud From Ransomware Now!
Texas I.T. Pros can work with your Denton or Wise County business to ensure your cloud environment is secure from ransomware and other threats.
Contact us today to learn more! Call 940-239-6500 or reach out online.