Think Your Backups Are Safe? Ransomware Gangs Don’t

As ransomware attacks grow more coordinated, cybercriminals are now prioritizing one of the most critical components of business continuity: your backup infrastructure. Before encrypting production environments, attackers are first compromising backups, eliminating the victim’s ability to recover and pressuring them to pay ransoms.

According to cybersecurity analysts, these attacks are no longer opportunistic but deliberately engineered. Threat actors are disabling backup agents, deleting snapshots, modifying retention policies, and even exploiting known vulnerabilities in backup platforms. Their goal: make recovery impossible.

Why Backups Are Failing: Common Pitfalls

The most common weaknesses in backup strategies stem from poor separation and a lack of immutability. When backups are stored in the same environment as production systems, they are easy targets for lateral movement and compromise.

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Attackers typically exploit:

• Active Directory for privilege escalation
• Hypervisor vulnerabilities for virtual host takeover
• Windows-based services to breach backup tools
• Unpatched CVEs on backup hosts

Additionally, relying solely on a single cloud provider—especially for services like Microsoft 365—creates a dangerous single point of failure. If attackers gain access to stolen credentials or APIs, both the production and backup environments can be simultaneously breached.

Building Resilient Backups with 3-2-1-1-0 Strategy

The outdated 3-2-1 rule is no longer enough. Today, security leaders are turning to the 3-2-1-1-0 model, which enhances resiliency against ransomware:

• 3 copies of data: 1 production + 2 backups
• 2 different media types: local disk and cloud
• 1 offsite copy: physically or logically isolated
• 1 immutable copy: not modifiable or deletable
• 0 errors: regular verification and testing

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Experts recommend using image-based backups over file-level copies, with hardened Linux-based backup appliances instead of standard Windows-based tools. Encryption, access control, and air-gapped cloud storage are critical to preventing backup tampering.

Cloud Backup Security: Isolation Is Everything

Cloud backups are not immune. Attackers are increasingly targeting cloud ecosystems where production data and backups coexist. To defend against this, organizations must adopt:

Cloud isolation: Backups should reside in a separate cloud infrastructure with its own authentication and access policies.

Private cloud architecture: Moving data into an alternative cloud environment creates logical air gaps and avoids shared vulnerabilities.

Strict access control: Use role-based access, biometric MFA, and never store credentials or tokens in the same environment you’re backing up.

Backup Recovery Confidence: How Datto BCDR Delivers It.

Leading solutions like Datto BCDR are helping businesses implement backup strategies designed for ransomware resilience. Built on hardened Linux with immutable cloud backups, Datto’s appliances offer:

• Local & cloud failover: Seamless switchover to cloud-hosted operations during outages
• Automated verification: Screenshots and application checks validate that backups work
• Ransomware detection: Active scans before recovery begins
• Instant recovery: Features like 1-Click Disaster Recovery and Cloud Deletion Defense