Why your storage is your last—and first—line of defense

Ransomware attacks are evolving at a breathtaking pace, becoming ever more sophisticated and damaging to your business. The rise of AI is amplifying this risk by creating new attack surfaces that put your data in even greater jeopardy.

NetApp^® Ransomware Resilience makes detecting, protecting, and recovering your NetApp ONTAP^® workloads from an attack easier, faster, and more effective—all without requiring deep security expertise or training. Ransomware Resilience helps you avoid data loss, limit downtime, and prevent lost revenue and business disruptions.

As the most secure storage on the planet, our goal is to give you advanced capabilities to address the evolving threat landscape. At NetApp INSIGHT^®, we’re announcing two major capabilities of Ransomware Resilience that focus on two critical use cases:

• Data breach detection uncovers early indicators of a potential data exfiltration attempt.
• Isolated recovery environment delivers fast, malware-free workload restoration and prevents reinfection. 

Let’s take a deep dive into what’s new and how Ransomware Resilience helps you protect your data and recover as quickly as possible in the event of an attack.

A successful ransomware attack can have devastating consequences for your business, including downtime, financial losses, steep legal penalties for compliance violations, and long-term damage to your organization's reputation. To address these threats, companies often invest heavily in a wide array of security tools, creating multiple layers of defense. However, they often overlook a crucial layer: the storage system, which is the ultimate target of the attackers and your last line of defense.

Ransomware Resilience helps address these shortcomings, bridging the gap with AI-powered data security. It enables you to drive comprehensive, orchestrated, workload-centric ransomware defense across file and block storage, from detection to recovery, all with a single control plane. But your storage is not just the last line of defense against an attack; it's also a powerful early line of defense against malicious data exfiltration.

The two new capabilities we’re launching are game-changing additions that strengthen your ability to thwart ransomware attacks and prevent them from causing damage.

Ransomware Resilience new data breach detection capability helps prevent data exfiltration as part of a double extortion ransomware attack. This technique, which is increasingly popular with attackers, involves stealing sensitive information before encrypting or locking down your data.

A double extortion attack typically follows this scenario: The attacker gains read access to critical data, exfiltrates a copy, and then encrypts the data in your storage, deleting all unencrypted copies. By doing so, they can attempt to extort you twice—first for the key to decrypt your files, and then a second time to prevent them from publicly releasing your stolen data.

With the new data breach detection capability, Ransomware Resilience significantly reduces the risk of an exfiltration attempt before it materializes. This AI-driven feature detects anomalous user behaviors—early indicators of compromise—that signal a potential attack. This means that we can catch the attacker right at the start of the process, before they can exfiltrate your data out of the network and start encrypting it. As soon as these indicators are detected, Ransomware Resilience automatically alerts both you and your SIEM and provides you with detailed forensic data to identify and block the user responsible for initiating the attack.

It’s no longer a question of if companies will experience a ransomware attack—it’s when. The key is to be able to recover quickly and safely, without losing data, disrupting your business operations, and paying the ransom.

Ransomware Resilience already orchestrates the data protection and recovery process by making NetApp Snapshot™ copies and restoring affected workloads within minutes. Now, the recovery process is getting even better with the isolated recovery environment—a new feature that gives you a clean, malware-free workload restoration and helps prevent reinfection of your data.

First, Ransomware Resilience initializes an isolated environment where a deep AI-powered scan is performed to precisely identify encrypted data. It also scans for and removes any malware. Next, it assesses your recovery point options, enabling you to choose the best one for your business needs. Finally, it guides you through the restoration process for fast and easy malware-free recovery of your workload data.

In addition to the AI-powered detection capabilities that are directly built into ONTAP for both NAS and SAN, Ransomware Resilience further reaffirms NetApp’s position as the most secure storage on the planet. With NetApp you can be confident that your organization is better positioned to withstand ransomware attacks and recover efficiently and securely, safeguarding your business operations and your reputation.

Data breach detection is available in preview. The isolated recovery environment is available in private preview.

You can learn more about Ransomware Resilience here and try it free of charge six months.

Disclaimer: No ransomware detection or prevention system can completely guarantee safety from a ransomware attack. Although it’s possible that an attack might go undetected, NetApp technology acts as an important additional layer of defense, and our research indicates that NetApp technology has resulted in a high degree of detection for certain file encryption-based ransomware attacks.