Active Directory and Its Critical Role in Ransomware Recovery
Ransomware has become a perpetual game of cat and mouse. As IT and security teams strive to stay one step ahead, threat actors ruthlessly mine for new methods, means, and vectors for their exploits. Their latest focus, Active Directory (AD). As a core element of centralized management, Active Directory has become a primary target, and pathway, to execute ransomware attacks. Now more than ever, it’s critical that today’s businesses consider AD protection in their overarching security and ransomware response strategies.
The Keys to the Castle
As a widely adopted authentication tool for small, medium, and enterprise businesses, AD is the gatekeeper of authorization processes for networks, applications, and environments. And while AD simplifies the lives of administrating access to key systems, it can be particularly challenging to secure. It controls an ever-changing pool of users, groups, policies, and app permissions. One misconfiguration, leaked password, or dormant account can enable a bad actor to elevate privileges and steal, corrupt, or deny access to critical applications and their data.
Propagating an Attack
Experts are finding AD playing a key and increasingly larger role in executing an attack. By exploiting blind spots, bad actors can compromise privileged accounts, mimic authorized users, and silently traverse infrastructure, workstations, and applications to establish their foothold. Failing to safeguard AD enables attackers with a centralized location to control and sever access to critical business assets.
How Metallic Helps
Safeguarding AD from ransomware requires purpose-built tools to prevent, detect, and recover from attack. And while some businesses have developed home-grown solutions, they are time-consuming to maintain, upkeep, and administer. With Metallic Backup, you get dedicated, single-solution protection for Microsoft Active Directory and Azure Active Directory – that helps to quickly restore your data.
Frequent backups enable users to undo damaging and unwanted changes to objects, attributes, users, groups, app registrations, and more. Fast, granular recovery options allow administrators view what’s changed their environment and easily recover missing, damaged or misconfigured items to thwart ongoing attacks. Users can even roll back entire AD instances at scale to uproot bad actors and get entire business systems or users back online.
Best of all… Active Directory Backup is included for FREE with every paid Metallic subscription.
Looking for more information? Check out our Active Directory webinar below and learn how Metallic AD Backup simplifies your ransomware recovery.
