Ransomware Mitigation with SafeMode Snapshots

In short, the attacker encrypts your organization's data and then sells you the encryption key to recover it. The fate of your data lies in the hands of an invisible person who promises that if you pay, you can get your data back. This doesn’t exactly instill confidence. And sometimes, even if you pay the ransom, you still can’t get your data back.

As a storage company, we feel it’s our responsibility to deliver a solution that can help if this happens to you. We came up with a way to mitigate the aftermath of a ransomware attack that puts the control of your data back into your hands.

With SafeMode enabled, we can’t prevent the attack from happening, but we can help mitigate the impact and get you up and running quickly after an attack.

SafeMode is essentially an immutable snapshot used to protect your data. Ransomware can’t delete, modify, or encrypt it. In order to understand how we mitigate the impact of ransomware with SafeMode, we need to review the typical sequence of events that occur during a ransomware attack:

1. The intruder gains access to a server or storage device. 
2. The intruder starts encrypting your data. 
3. The application crashes and operations go offline until you pay the ransom.
4. The ransom is paid, and you can (maybe) restart the application with access to the unencrypted data.

How would an attack be different if you were protected by SafeMode snapshots?

The intruder can still gain access and encrypt your data. But when it comes to deleting SafeMode snapshots, the intruder can’t—because they’re locked and protected.

Your operations are either minimally interrupted or not impacted at all. And forget about paying the ransom. In other words, you have control over your data, not the intruder.

SafeMode is also easy to set up and maintain. We provide a cloud-based tool called Pure1® that can assess your environment's vulnerability. It shows you where you have exposure points and the steps to take to remediate weaknesses, so you’re armed and ready.  

What makes this even better? SafeMode functionality is built into our products. There’s no complicated setup, no professional services engagement, and no compromises.

Cyber attacks are becoming more common, with an attack expected to take place every two seconds by 2031. However, there are things that you can do to mitigate damage from a cyber attack, like performing regular updates, using robust encryption, having user access control, and maintaining vigilant monitoring.

With the Pure1 AIOps Management Platform, you can mitigate risk with a data protection assessment, a replication and snapshot dashboard, anomaly detection, data resiliency scoring, proactive vulnerability patches, and asset management.

If you are impacted, a guaranteed clean recovery environment is available through the Everpure Evergreen//One™ ransomware recovery SLA.

Find out how Everpure can help protect your data.