Huawei has announced a new series of cybersecurity solutions to counter the rising threat of ransomware attacks. Ransomware attacks have grown by 350% globally in the last five years, and every 14 seconds an organization falls victim to a ransomware attack. The Global Cybersecurity Outlook 2022 has found that ransomware attacks are among the highest business concerns for cyber leaders. Huawei is introducing technology solutions that can help ensure data is backed up, encrypted, and kept separate to prevent it from being taken by hackers.
At the recent ISACA Kenya conference, Maureen Mwaniki, Huawei Kenya Vice Director for Programs Management, announced that Huawei Ransomware Protection Storage Solution covers Storage Area Network (SAN), Network-Attached Storage (NAS), and backup storage scenarios. Key technologies such as storage encryption, air gap, secure snapshot, and Write Once, Read Many (WORM) are used to implement data anti-tampering, security detection, and secure recovery. Some of the new Huawei tools can detect potential ransomware attacks and quickly raise an alarm to minimize data theft or even isolate attacks to keep them away from the main data.
Ransomware is a type of software that enables a remote user to access data, make it inaccessible to the original owner, and demand a ransom in order to return that data. Ransomware is often caused by phishing, where users are tricked into clicking on certain links that might lead to them downloading or installing viruses or sharing sensitive or personal information. Such information may be abused or sold, or used to hack into systems. In some cases, information on an infected network is encrypted and held ransom until payment is made to retrieve the information.
Ms. Mwaniki noted that ransomware as a business model is very effective because the cost to a business from not having their data available may be over 20 times more than the requested ransom, thus encouraging payment. The cost of recovery following a ransomware attack is estimated at Ksh 120 million.
Huawei is supporting the local tech industry’s end-to-end approach to cybersecurity solutions covering the whole network, from the brains to backbone, mobile base station, interfaces with the devices and users on the network. It is crucial to assume that there can be problems in software used on devices, with weaknesses in code or software design, either accidentally or after someone has intervened maliciously in the software development or afterwards in software updates.
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