In an age where data is as more precious than gold, protecting it from ransomware attacks is critical.
Pipe Ten, as a managed services and backup provider, implements robust strategies to safeguard your data. This post explores how we help you adhere to the “Principles for ransomware-resistant cloud backups,” ensuring you and your stakeholder’s data remains secure and recoverable, even under attack.
NCSC: Principles for ransomware-resistant cloud backups
NCSC, the UK Government organisation focused on cyber security, has created a set of principles to consider, which lay out the best practices to make sure that cloud backups are more resistant to ransomware. In essence, they describe the features a service should offer for backups to be resilient to ransomware actors. Read the NCSC principles for full details.
Principle 1: Resilience to Destructive Actions
Ransomware attacks often target backup systems to prevent recovery, necessitating resilient backup solutions. Pipe Ten’s backup architecture is designed with redundancy and immutable backup storage options, which prevent malicious tampering, deletion, or editing of backup data. By leveraging logically air-gapped, offsite, read-only backup copies, we ensure that your critical data can withstand aggressive cyber threats.
Principle 2: Guaranteed Access to Backups
A fundamental aspect of data protection is ensuring continuous access to backups, even during an attack. We address this by enforcing strict identity and access management (IAM) policies, which safeguard against the deletion of customer accounts or access credentials. Multi-factor authentication and role-based access control are enforced as part of a general strategy to prevent unauthorised access, ensuring that legitimate users can always retrieve their data when needed.
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Principle 3: Protection Against Corrupted Backups
Our backup solution allows customers to revert to historical backup versions, providing a safeguard against corrupted data infiltrating recent backups. This capability is crucial when attackers attempt to compromise the integrity of stored data. Our standardised backup and retention profiles are designed to align with your business’s risk management strategies, enabling regular validation and testing of backup integrity.
Principle 4: Robust Key Management
Data encryption is a non-negotiable defence mechanism in the protection of data at rest. Pipe Ten employs advanced encryption techniques to secure backup data, paired with stringent key management practices. These measures ensure that credentials are protected against unauthorised modification or deletion, maintaining the availability and integrity of the decryption keys when needed for data recovery.
Principle 5: Proactive Alerting Systems
Pipe Ten’s monitoring and alerting systems play a vital role in the early detection of potential ransomware activities. Within the backup platform itself, we detect and alert on significant events such as mass deletion requests, unexpected changes in backup routines, or modifications to encryption policies. This is in addition to system and network monitoring, log ingestion and other protections applies to the underlying systems. These mechanisms ensure that any malicious attempt is quickly identified and addressed, providing an essential layer of security against ransomware attacks.
Pipe Ten’s comprehensive approach to data protection aligns closely with the NCSC principles for ransomware-resistant backups, offering businesses peace of mind that their data is secure and recoverable in any scenario. By implementing our backup solutions, organisations can strengthen their defences against the evolving landscape of cyber threats and ensure business continuity.
Author: Carl Heaton
Carl is a founder of Pipe Ten and uses his role as Technical Director to drive the company’s vision to transform business online in delivering it’s mission to forge agile technical partnerships that accelerate web success. Carl boasts an illustrious career spanning over two decades, starting as a fledgling web developer in his teens, he swiftly ascended the ranks, honing his skills in architecting secure web application infrastructure. With his finger on the pulse of emerging web technologies, Carl has tracked and influenced the ever changing world of cyber security, internet governance, industry regulations and information security compliance ensuring Pipe Ten successfully achieved and maintain ISO/IEC 27001 certification.