LockBit ransomware hits Accenture, why backup matters?

Recently, global solution provider giant Accenture has been reported to be the victim of LockBit ransomware attack for $50 million ransoms, with 6 TB of data and 2500+ computers being hacked.

LockBit, formerly known as “ABCD” ransomware, was first appeared in September 2019 and attacked by cracking weak RDP passwords, and using various scanning and brute force cracking tools to expand the encryption area of data for higher ransoms. In the past two years, it has been targeting important enterprises and government in China, India, Indonesia, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and several other countries.

In the attack disclosed on August 12, the hacker team used LockBit 2.0 to target Accenture, the largest listed company ranked in Fortune Global 500. Compared with the original version, LockBit 2.0 is more aggressive and can be regarded as the world’s fastest encryption software, being able to encrypt 100GB data in only 4 minutes with capacity of automated distribution.

According to the hacker team, if Accenture refuses to pay the $50 million in time, they will make the stolen 6 TB data publicly available.

Learning from this, we can see that data security has always been a mission-critical and long-term issue for enterprises. To better avoid attacks from any possible ransomware or malware, we provide some useful resolutions:

1. Level up security awareness, do not click on unfamiliar links and emails.

2. Avoid too much reuse of the same account and password for multiple servers.

3. Set access permissions for important documents.

4. Fix system bugs in time.

Besides deploying daily anti-ransomware practices to prevent attacks at a plain level, having a complete and reliable backup and disaster recovery (DR) solution can help deepen and simplify data protection to get enterprises fully prepared in advance.

The Vinchin Solution

Offsite Disaster Recovery

Vinchin Backup & Recovery provides offsite backup copy feature to keep critical data remotely by duplicate local backup copy to offsite data center. In case when primary backup data is damaged due to ransomware attacks, enterprises can still use offsite backup copy to restore data from offsite to local backup storage for full VM restore, file-level restore and instant VM restore to realize effective disaster recovery

Archive Backup Data to Cloud

For government and financial companies who are more likely to become the victim of ransomware attacks, cloud archive can effectively secure data and achieve long-term data retention. Vinchin Backup & Recovery provides enterprises with both local archive and cloud archive strategy. In case when local data is encrypted, archived data can still be transferred back to the local production environment for fast business recovery.

Backup Data Encryption

In version 6.5 of Vinchin Backup & Recovery to be released this year, the unique Vinchin backup encryption technology will also be available to realize the true protection of backup data.  When any kind of ransomware or malware tries to modify the backup data, the access will be directly denied by Vinchin backup system, guaranteeing higher data integrity for effective business recovery.

The capacity of ransomware grows with time. Throughout so many ransomware attack cases, most enterprises who don't have backups often choose to pay high ransoms rather than the loss of highly valuable data. But preventing problems before they occur is the real golden rule, and backing up data in advance is the key to fight against ransomware.