Keeping Your Data Safe with Huawei's Proactive & Precise Protection

Ransomware is the biggest cybersecurity threat to enterprises today. According to CheckPoint, the number of ransomware attacks worldwide rose by an alarming 33%, and the ransom payment rate hit a record high of 80%, according to a Veeam survey on 1,200 IT practitioners in 14 countries. There is no doubt that protecting key data assets is more important than ever. Storage systems are the last line of defense for safeguarding data. The Huawei OceanStor Dorado all-flash storage solution comes with industry-leading resilience capabilities such as intelligent ransomware detection, secure snapshot, Air Gap isolation, and compliance/enterprise WORM to protect customers' key data assets.

Intelligent ransomware detection uses machine learning algorithms to detect unusual behaviors like unusual encryption and file modification and determine whether a file has been maliciously encrypted by ransomware. This solution has a few challenges:

Challenge 1: Timely alerts

By the time a user is alerted, a file is likely to have been partially encrypted, meaning information has already been lost. It is important to minimize the risk and impact of such losses.

Challenge 2: Accurate detection 

New ransomware uses intermittent encryption (for example, encryption every 16 bytes) or slow and progressive encryption to deceive detection algorithms. Data protection solutions need to be able to identify and cope with such sophisticated attacks.

Challenge 3: Performance

As detection scenarios diversify and algorithms upgrade, more computing power is required to run ransomware detection algorithms, and this has an impact on service performance.

1.    Proactive protection for NAS storage

The new detection algorithm intelligently generates honeyfiles based on the types of files in the target file system, and these act as a "buffer" for key data. The storage system dynamically monitors malicious behavior such as the deletion, renaming, and encryption of honeyfiles, so that it can promptly alert users and minimize or prevent data loss. Furthermore, the honeyfile-based detection mechanism can effectively counter more sophisticated attacks that use intermittent, slow, or progressive encryption. According to lab tests based on more than 80 typical ransomware samples, the solution has a 100% successful detection rate.

2.    Dedicated computing power to support an increasingly diverse set of scenarios and more sophisticated algorithms

Huawei has launched a new pluggable function card to offload detection algorithms so that there are sufficient computing resources available to maintain performance. This card runs on Huawei's proprietary storage software and hardware. Its CPU and memory specifications can be tailored to different scenarios and workloads.

With these innovative capabilities, Huawei's new ransomware protection solution delivers timely alerts, higher-precision detection, and wider applicability with minimal impact on performance. This solution is extremely beneficial for enterprises because it significantly improves data resilience and protects key data from ransomware threats, and this makes the business itself more resilient.

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Disclaimer: Any views and/or opinions expressed in this post by individual authors or contributors are their personal views and/or opinions and do not necessarily reflect the views and/or opinions of Huawei Technologies.