In this article

Role of backup in ransomware recovery
Ransomware detection techniques
Ransomware recovery strategies
Should you pay the ransom?
What to do after a ransomware attack

Ransomware Recovery Guide: How to Recover from a Ransomware Attack

18 Dec 2024

5 min read

Anju George

Blog Articles

Article at a glance

Ransomware attacks cause significant downtime, data loss, and costly recovery for businesses.

Backups are essential: Use 3-2-1 backups, immutable copies, and automated schedules to ensure fast recovery without paying ransoms.

Early detection: Identify threats with signature detection, behavior analysis, and abnormal network traffic monitoring.

Ransomware has become increasingly prevalent in recent years, making it one of the most significant threats businesses face today.

59% of organizations fell victim to ransomware attacks in 2024, with a 5x increase in average ransom payments and recovery costs.

The State of Ransomware 2024, Sophos

Ransomware recovery involves actions organizations take to mitigate the impact of ransomware attacks. An organization's success in recovering from a ransomware attack depends heavily on the strength of its backup and data protection strategies, and the severity of the ransomware's impact.

1. Role of backup in ransomware recovery

Regular and comprehensive backups are crucial for defending against ransomware attacks. By having a copy of your data stored securely elsewhere, you can restore your systems quickly without having to negotiate with cybercriminals. This minimizes downtime and reduces the leverage attackers have over organizations. However, a poorly implemented backup strategy can leave you vulnerable to ransomware.

To ensure your backup strategy is comprehensive and effective against ransomware, consider the following best practices:

Implement the 3-2-1 backup rule: Maintain at least three copies of your data, store these copies in two different locations, and keep one backup copy offsite. This diversity in storage helps safeguard against various failure modes.
Regular testing: Periodically testing your backups ensures they are both recoverable and complete. Restoration drills can help identify potential issues before you rely on these backups during an actual ransomware attack.
Use immutable and air-gapped backups: Implementing immutable backups that cannot be altered or deleted within a certain timeframe adds an extra layer of security. Similarly, air-gapped backups, physically or logically isolated from the network, are less vulnerable to cyberattacks.
Encryption and authentication: Encrypting your backup data and using strong authentication methods can help prevent unauthorized access to your backups.
Automate backups: Automating backups reduces the risk of human error and ensures that data is backed up regularly without manual intervention.
Review and update your backup strategy regularly: As your organization's data landscape evolves and new threats emerge, periodically reviewing and updating your backup strategy ensures that it remains effective against the latest ransomware tactics.
Secure backup access: Limit access to backup data to only those who need it, reducing the potential attack surface for malicious actors looking to compromise your backups.
Educate employees: Educate your staff on the importance of regular backups and secure handling of backup devices to prevent data breaches. Also, train them on phishing and ransomware risks, and the importance of reporting any suspicious activity immediately.

1.1. How data backup protects against ransomware threats

Data recovery: With regular backups, organizations can quickly restore their data to a pre-attack state, thwarting ransom demands.
Reduced downtime: The average cost of IT downtime is $5,600 per minute or $336,000 per hour. In the event of a ransomware attack, having a backup enables quick recovery, bypassing lengthy and costly restoration processes. This saves time, ensures business continuity, and prevents extensive financial repercussions that could take years to overcome.
Business continuity: Regular backups enable swift data restoration, thus reducing operational disruption and maintaining customer trust.
Compliance: Many industries have stringent regulations that require you to preserve data for a certain period. Backups ensure that you can maintain data integrity and access, meeting legal and regulatory requirements even after a breach.

Pro tip

Protect your backups from ransomware attacks: Ransomware can compromise both your live data and your backups, but SysCloud's Ransomware Protection add-on provides a powerful safeguard. It inspects backup files in real time to detect ransomware threats like batch programs, executables, and macro-enabled files. With proactive alerts and easy-to-use recovery options, you can take control of infected files before they spread.

How it works:

🛡️ Ransomware detection: Automatically identifies suspicious files during backups, including encrypted files caused by ransomware attacks.

📊 Detailed ransomware reports: View a full threat report and decide your next steps — take control of the file, delete it from backup archives and user drives, or dismiss false positives.

🔄 Point-in-time recovery: Restore files to a known safe state by choosing from previous versions of files saved in the latest backup snapshots.

🚫 Malicious file isolation: Instantly remove infected files from both user drives and backup archives to prevent reinfection.

2. Ransomware detection techniques

Ransomware detection relies on a multi-layered approach to identify and isolate threats before they cause significant damage. Here are some common ransomware detection methods:

Detection by signature:
Traditional antivirus and anti-malware tools use signature detection to identify known ransomware variants based on specific patterns or signatures associated with the malware. Malware carries a unique signature composed of information like domain names, IP addresses, and other indicators that identify it. Signature-based detection uses a library of these signatures to compare them to active files running on a machine.
However, this method is not always effective as ransomware attackers frequently modify malware files to evade detection. Thus, signature-based detection helps to identify older ransomware strains but leaves systems vulnerable to every new malware variant.
Detection by behavior:
This method involves monitoring the behavior of applications and the system for actions typical of ransomware, such as rapid encryption of files or unexpected changes in file storage locations and alerting users to it.
Behavioral analysis can detect ransomware that evades traditional signature-based detection. This approach won’t prevent a ransomware attack but will help prevent the attack from spreading once it has been identified.
Detection by abnormal traffic:
Abnormal traffic detection is an extension of behavior-based detection, but it works at the network level. This approach is based on the understanding that a ransomware attack often involves data exfiltration (the unauthorized copying, transfer, or retrieval of data from a server or an individual's computer) before encrypting files. This can result in significant data being transferred to external systems, creating detectable network anomalies.
By tracking these deviations, cybersecurity systems can trace the source of the abnormal activity, which enables organizations to quickly isolate the threat and mitigate the attack by removing the ransomware from the source.

3. Ransomware recovery strategies

Your ransomware recovery strategy can depend on several factors, including:

The anticipated recovery time
The financial impact on your business
The risk of sensitive information being leaked if the ransom isn't paid

Here are some approaches you can consider to recover from a ransomware attack:

Implement an incident response plan
Restore from backups
Work with ransomware recovery services
Utilize decryption tools

3.1. Implement your ransomware response plan

Preparing and deploying a ransomware-specific incident response plan (IRP) is essential for organizations to effectively manage and mitigate ransomware attacks. A ransomware IRP outlines immediate measures for the security operations center (SOC), network operations center, and system administrators to take in response to a known or suspected ransomware event.

Key steps in a ransomware IRP include the following:

Initial actions like collecting log data from the compromised system to understand the attack (Identifying and confirming the incident as a ransomware attack).
A communication plan that identifies internal stakeholders such as IT, security, and legal, and external stakeholders such as law enforcement, customers, and incident response companies.
Assessing the scope and impact of the ransomware incident.
Implement measures to isolate and contain the ransomware to prevent further spread.
Apply strategies to neutralize the threat and begin recovery processes.
Based on the laws in your area, you must report the cyberattack to relevant authorities and law enforcement agencies, such as the FBI or CISA. Assess the legal implications related to data protection and privacy regulations, along with your ethical duties.
Conduct a digital forensics investigation to understand the attack's origins, methods, and vulnerabilities exploited.

The incident response team should periodically review and update the IRP to suit current infrastructures, staff, and processes. Regular drills and tabletop exercises are critical for ensuring that everyone involved is familiar with the plan and can execute it effectively and identifying areas for improvement.

3.2. Restore data from backups

Without a data backup, businesses are often at a complete loss when a ransomware attack occurs, which may compel them to pay a ransom without any assurance of data retrieval. Backups are the quickest and most reliable way to recover from a ransomware attack. Click here for the best practices to enhance backup efficacy.

Pro tip

Ensure data integrity: It is crucial to ensure your backups are not infected by ransomware and are still usable. SysCloud inspects the data being backed up for the presence of ransomware. In the event of a ransomware attack, admins can delete the file from the backup archives and the users’ drives and restore it from a safe snapshot.

🔗 Learn more about the Ransomware Protection add-on

94% of organizations hit by ransomware in the past year said that the cybercriminals attempted to compromise their backups during the attack. 57% of backup compromise attempts were successful.

The State of Ransomware 2024, Sophos

With SysCloud backup, organizations can easily recover from ransomware attacks. SysCloud’s point-in-time restore lets administrators "turn back the clock" to recover data from any available backup snapshot. Admins can review all backup instances and select the exact version to restore — ensuring you’re always working with a clean, uninfected file.

3.3. Work with ransomware recovery services

You can work with a professional ransomware recovery service provider to decrypt your files. These specialized firms vary in reputation and success rates; therefore, it is important to evaluate their expertise before you hire them.

Look for companies with a strong record of success in ransomware recovery.
Reputable services will evaluate your situation and give an honest answer as to whether they can recover your data.
Keep in mind that these services are often expensive, and there’s no guarantee you will get your data back.

3.4. Utilize ransomware decryption tools

At times, it’s possible to decrypt ransomware-infected files using decryption tools. Ransomware decryption tools are specialized software programs designed to decrypt files encrypted by specific ransomware strains. The success of this method relies on the type of ransomware. Security experts sometimes find vulnerabilities in specific ransomware variants, enabling the creation of decryption tools that can free encrypted files without the need to pay a ransom. However, the most successful cybercriminals use very strong encryption, typically using 128-bit or 256-bit encryption, making decryption extremely challenging.

It's crucial to stay informed about the latest developments in ransomware decryption technologies and consult with cybersecurity professionals to explore all available recovery options.

To use a ransomware decryption tool:

Identify the ransomware variant that has encrypted your files. This information may be included in the ransom note or can be determined using cybersecurity tools.
After identifying the ransomware strain, search for a decryption tool specifically designed for that strain. Make sure to download the tool from a reputable source and then, follow the provided instructions to decrypt your files.

4. The most asked question: Should you pay the ransom?

While paying the ransom may seem like a quick fix, it's generally not recommended. This decision comes with a complex web of financial, ethical, and security considerations.

There are both moral and technical hazards to paying the ransom. The obvious moral hazard is that paying the ransom directly funds criminal enterprises, making their attacks much more effective against the next victims. The technical hazard to paying the ransom is a high chance you'll get hit again - hackers see you as an easy target with money to spare. According to a study by Cybereason, 80% of ransomware victims who paid the ransom were hit by a subsequent ransomware attack, with 68% of compromised organizations saying that the second attack came less than a month later and that the hackers demanded a higher ransom.

4.1. Legal and compliance risks

Legal considerations also play a role in the decision-making process. In some jurisdictions, paying ransomware demands can lead to legal repercussions, especially if the attack is linked to sanctioned entities. Organizations must navigate not only the immediate impact of the ransomware attack but also the complex legal landscape surrounding ransom payments.

4.2. Hire a ransomware negotiator

Despite the aforementioned risks, if an organization decides ransom payment is the only viable option, it's crucial to hire a professional ransomware negotiator. Most experienced negotiators have worked with many different ransomware groups and can offer sound advice on whether continuing negotiations is worthwhile or whether it's time to halt.

It's common for external incident response (IR) firms and cyber insurance providers to employ negotiators, who can be provided on request by the victim. These services should ideally be identified and arranged for prior to any ransomware incident. When entering agreements with cyber insurance or IR services, organizations should ask if negotiation services are available and if there are additional charges. This information and details on how to get in touch with a negotiator should be documented in the organization's incident response (IR) plan. This ensures readiness and swift action in the event of a ransomware attack.

4.3. What after the ransom payment?

The decision to pay the ransom doesn't end the recovery process; it merely begins a new phase of restoring operations. Organizations that pay the ransom often face double the recovery costs compared to those that do not, dealing with the inefficiencies of ransomware decryptors provided by the attackers and the necessity to rebuild or secure their IT infrastructure to prevent future attacks.

Organizations must also be aware of the evolving landscape of cyber insurance and legal sanctions, particularly when dealing with sanctioned entities. With cyber insurance policies and the legal implications of paying ransoms to these groups frequently changing, it's crucial to thoroughly understand what your policy covers and the potential legal repercussions you might face if you choose to pay. Don't get caught off guard - be proactive and ensure you're well informed about your insurance coverage and the legal landscape before a ransomware attack occurs.

To sum it up, it's critical for victims of a ransomware attack to make an informed decision based on a complete understanding of their situation. They must be aware of all the risks of paying the ransom, as well as get a clear evaluation of how likely they are to recover from the attack without paying the ransom.

5. What to do after a ransomware attack

After a ransomware attack, conducting a detailed postmortem examination is crucial to analyze what happened and prevent future incidents.

Assess the impact and extent of the ransomware attack: Conduct a post-recovery evaluation. Understand the attack's full extent and measure its impact in terms of downtime and financial losses. Identify how the hackers gained access and whether the attack affected your backups.
Fix vulnerabilities: Identify your network’s weak spots and fix them. This can include updating software, getting rid of old systems, or changing how certain tools are used. Also, this is a good time to retrain your team on cybersecurity best practices.
Strengthen security: Review who has access to what and ensure people only have the permissions they really need. Consider setting up more virtual private networks (VPNs) to keep different parts of your network separated and safer. Using multi-factor authentication (MFA) can also add an extra layer of security.
Adopt long-term security measures: Connect with leading cybersecurity organizations like NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) and CISA (Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency). They offer guidance and tools to lower your risk of future attacks, improve your security, and ensure your systems are better protected.

6. Conclusion

While recovering from ransomware attacks is possible, it requires significant prior preparation. It’s not advisable to pay the ransom, since most companies that pay a ransom still don’t recover all their data.

The key to successful recovery lies in a multilayered approach, including:

Robust security: Implement strong security measures to minimize vulnerabilities.
Solid backups: Develop a comprehensive backup strategy that utilizes multiple, immutable copies.
Prepared response: Craft a clear ransomware response plan and train your team thoroughly.
Early detection: Prioritize the early detection of ransomware to minimize damage.
Continuous improvement: Regularly review and improve your defenses to stay ahead of evolving threats.

With these proactive steps, you can significantly increase your chances of recovering from a ransomware attack with minimal disruption.

In this article

Role of backup in ransomware recovery
Ransomware detection techniques
Ransomware recovery strategies
Should you pay the ransom?
What to do after a ransomware attack