How to Leverage “Object Lock” to Mitigate Against Ransomware Attacks

Did you know that cybercrime is predicted to cost the world $8 trillion USD in 2023?

This is according to the 2022 Official Cybercrime Report published by Cybersecurity Ventures. If that number was measured as a country, then cybercrime would be the world’s third-largest economy after the U.S. and China.  

Staggering! But let’s break down those numbers even further.  

• $8 trillion USD a year.  
• $667 billion a month.  
• $154 billion a week.  
• $21.9 billion a day.  
• $913 million an hour.  
• $15.2 million a minute.  
• $255,000 second.  

These monetary stats certainly put things into perspective.

But, what about operational downtime and data loss?

According to the recently published 2022 State of Ransomware Preparedness Report, a mind-boggling 40% of respondents suffering a ransomware attack would be without business-critical systems for between 2 and 15 days. The 2022 IBM Cost of Data Breach Report mentioned that 80% of businesses experienced downtime as a result of data loss in 2021. Can you imagine the fiscal downfalls of not being operational for any amount of time? Have you ever thought about how much cybercrime is costing your organization?   

Regardless of the cause of the data loss and the various financial pitfalls, it’s important that businesses have a plan in place to recover as quickly as possible with minimal disruption.   

Piggybacking off part 1 of this 4-part blog series, you can never underestimate the power of having a multi-layer ransomware protection strategy in place. “The only way to protect against ransomware is to put as many layers as possible between us and the attacker,” says Marko Ljubanovic, Director, Global Systems, at HYCU.    

In a recent webinar titled “A Practical Guide to Ransomware: Recovery with HYCU and Wasabi,” Drew Schlussel, Sr. Director, Product Marketing at Wasabi, joined Marko and gave us a first look at how an air-gapped and immutable recovery solution designed specifically for ransomware recovery can give your organization the peace of mind that it can get back to business cleanly, quickly, and easily.  

With peace of mind, comes security reassurance. When we talk about security reassurance and ransomware recovery capabilities, we need to talk about “object lock” and how to best leverage it.  

This brings us to part 2 of this series “How to leverage object lock to mitigate against ransomware attacks”.   

What is “object lock”?   

Object lock can help prevent objects from being deleted or overwritten for a set amount of time or indefinitely. You can use object lock to help meet regulatory requirements that require write-once, ready-many (WORM) storage to simply add another layer of protection against object changes and deletion.    

“Combining Wasabi’s immutable cloud storage with object lock built-in and HYCU’s data protection as a service solution to enable rapid, application-centric recovery, gives you the tools you need to keep malicious threat actors out of your backup environment and get back up and running when your production environment is corrupted,” emphasized Drew Schlussel.   

By bringing the highest level of security to your backups by using HYCU with Wasabi’s Object Lock feature, it allows you to create immutable files for set retention periods. Combined with an air-gapped approach – dedicated storage, networks, and accounts – you’ll keep data locked down and intruders out. HYCU and Wasabi make backups more secure, as well as make it easier to keep backups for longer, which helps protect against dormant ransomware.   

Why does object lock matter?

Technology shifts and employee turnover is real. With all the different organizational moving parts, using immutable objects guarantees that information is immune to accidental or intentional deletion and manipulation.    

Object lock is also a security blanket against cybercriminals attacking your secondary/backup systems to get their ransoms. Object lock gives you that extra layer to protect ALL your backups, both primary and secondary environments.   

Furthermore, it is vital that data in regulated industries be safeguarded for compliance and consumer protection standards. Object lock can also help organizations with certain government affiliations and industry regulations like HIPAA, FINRA, and CJIS to secure and preserve digital records, transaction data, and activity logs.   

And lastly, legal proceedings are reliant on chain of custody and immutability when it comes to providing digital evidence, such as surveillance video. Object lock protects against digital enhancement technology like deep fakes and altered footage, which have become so prevalent today.

When it comes to ransomware protection there are a lot of areas to improve on and some of those areas have critical components. Understanding those areas of improvement is essential to ensure maximum protection for all your workloads.  

Does your ransomware protection strategy or lack thereof give you peace of mind to recover from an attack? Find out by downloading the 2022 State of Ransomware Preparedness Report.  

Be sure to check back for part 3 in this series ….