Learn how to – Best Practices To Protect Your Databases From Ransomware Attacks

Learn how to – Best Practices To Protect Your Databases From Ransomware Attacks.

Technology advancement has seen organizations build innovative solutions for their day-to-day operations. However, as this happens, they also need to come up with cybersecurity practices to protect these solutions.

Building a ransomware strategy for the protection of applications, databases, and other solutions should be one of the most important things for any organization. Without this, organizations and their employees would be left exposed to unauthorized access, something that can lead to the loss of confidential and important information.

The past few years have seen a rise in ransomware attacks. A week does not go by without hearing about a reputable company that has been attacked by cybercriminals. However, you can take several measures to protect your databases from ransomware attacks. Some of these measures include;

Taking Care of Credentials

One of the most common ways attackers rely on is getting the admin credentials of your domain from your workstation’s memory. They can use these credentials to access any part of your network without any problems.

Setting a different account for all your administrative tasks is one way of avoiding ransomware attacks. The user account you use on your local computer should not have the same privileges as your administrative account.

If you want to be extra careful, then you can set a different domain for your servers. In addition, make sure that you have carefully set the permissions for service accounts. Each service should only have the permissions that it needs for its functions.

Lock Down Your Network

Even though software firewalls are not the only security measures you need to protect your databases, they are far much better than having nothing. You should make sure that only web and application server computers can connect to your databases.

Doing this is, however, not enough. You still need to manage and protect your databases. One way of doing this is by locking them down with jump hosts through a secured subnet. 

This does not represent your virtual or physical network segmentation, but you can implement it on database servers without any cables. It helps in protecting your databases from ransomware attacks.

Install Multi-Factor Authentication

This goes back to the discussion above on taking care of your credentials. Even though installing a multi-factor authentication for all services in your network can be challenging, it goes a long way in protecting your databases from ransomware attacks.

To start with, even if your authentication details get into the wrong hands, you can hardly be breached since you have to grant access to the network, service, or database that the ransomware attack wants to access.

Your users might complain about how long or difficult it is for them to gain access to these services, but you should make sure that they understand the importance of strong security. Always remember that good security is difficult – something that means that it works.

Always Update Everything – Software and Systems

It is also important to make sure that you are using the latest version of all systems and software applications. Technology advancement has had a negative effect as well – the evolution of ransomware to bypass outdated systems and software applications.

When a new version of a system or software application is released, it comes with security patches and new security measures to improve the previous versions. Meanwhile, cybercriminals keep on looking for loopholes in the existing and outdated systems for attacks.

Updating your systems and software applications locks ransomware away since you are using the latest security patches. 

Offline Backups

Well, most people are going to argue about this. One of the reasons for their arguments might be ease of access, cost, and the management of backups. The truth is that technology advancement has seen many organizations migrate their services to the cloud. However, is it enough to backup your data in the cloud?

Even though it might be good, you need to think about the security of your backups in the cloud. What would be easier between ransomware attacking a database backup in the cloud or one in a hard drive somewhere in a secure place? 

This might be challenging depending on the size of backups that you have. However, it is a good way of protecting your databases from ransomware attacks.

In conclusion, always have anti-malware and antivirus software installed in your system. This is the most common and the first step you should take before you even start using a system. These software applications can detect, scan, delete malware, and warn you in case of ransomware attacks. In addition, make sure that your firewall is well configured.