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“Wanna Cry”

“Wanna Cry” is one of the ransomware that spreaded around 150 countries throughout the world and infected more than 200,000 computers of government, public institutions, companies and individuals in May 2017.
According to the report, more than 15,000 computers were damaged, and, moreover, some reports say that organizations and companies supporting social infrastructure are infected.

How to Protect your Data

When you heard the word “data protection”, I guess you come up with backup.
Recently, disk-based backups are popular. We easily back up by using OS function such as the restore point or shadow copy. It's better than not doing any backups.
But don’t you wonder “this kind of backup is enough to protect my computer from ransomwear”?

If you backup data in the area which is visible from the computer, it’s better to reconsider the way to save your data.
The data could be encrypted once ransomware infects your computers. When you consider how to backup against ransomware, it is more important to consider where and how to back up than only considering the way to back up. In order to protect data from ransomware for sure, it is the safest measure to save the backup data in the offline area where we can't access from the computer. It is one of effective ways to backup data in tape storage, which is typical offline storage.

When you backup data in removable media such as tape storage, ransomware can never threaten the data even if ransomware infects your computer. By storing long-term and multiple generations of data into the tape, data can be perfectly restored even if you take a long time to find your computer is infected. For example, you can restore the data from backup data 4 days ago if the data was encrypted 3 days ago.

Easy to Use Tape with LTFS

You might think it is hard to construct restoration environments and to restore files by data backed up in tape storage. As you think, it may be necessary to start with the environment construction of backup server when ransomware spreads throughout the whole system.
Then, how about using LTFS (Linear Tape File System)?
LTFS enables you to write and read as file copy. Tape media is always recorded as write-once type, though LTFS is based on file system. As a result, even if the threat of ransomware spans the tape media mounted on LTFS, the past data recorded by LTFS is not affected. Thus, it is possible to retrieve the original data by rolling back.
Also, when it is troublesome to replace the tape cartridge, it is possible to automate cartridge replacement by using the autochanger or library.

Ransomware spreads around the world quickly, has strong infectivity, and has great influence. Names of infected companies can be reported in the news. Reported companies can be affected by secondary damage to corporate value and trust.
How about considering the "disk to disk to tape (D2D2T)" back up?