BlackBerry is attempting to make it easier for a businesses to protect itself against ransomware attacks by introducing a new recovery feature for its Workspaces platform, it announced on Monday.
Making the announcement at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, Blackberry, in a press release, called the feature a precise recovery tool able to minimize the disruption a business may face when attacked by ransomware.
“In this current climate it’s like we have to be right every time and the criminal only has to be right once,” Christine Gadsby, BlackBerry’s director of product security operations, told IT World Canada, “Everybody is fighting the same battle, none of us are immune. We can try as hard as we want to prepare for attacks but we all have to be ready if the worst thing happens.”
This is true, according to statistics from Verizon’s Data Breach Investigation Report, ransomware is the most common form of malware that a company may be hit with and as IT World Canada has reported, incidents are still on the rise.
Gadsby said the tool is a way for companies to efficiently deal with attacks with minimal loss to productivity or revenue.
“It’s taking a surgical and precise approach versus trying to control everything and destroying everything at the same time,” she said.
The Workspace recovery tool “freezes the account of the affected users” and allows the account administrator to check logs, pinpoint and isolate workspaces, folders and files that have been affected by the attack. They can then revert those projects back to the pre-attack versions, eliminating and quarantining any affected users
According to Gadsby this is different from other recovery systems because it goes beyond version control and there is no limit to how far back files can be recovered.
“There are lots of solutions that do a lot of great recovery but you have to lock down the whole shop, stop producing other items and it can stop the flow of business,” she said, arguing that these other approaches can be costly.
She calls BlackBerry’s recovery tool “the only solution that allows precise user instance control while being able to get to the root of problem.”
BlackBerry offers Workspaces as a file sharing and management platform for businesses and this new feature is yet another development of the company’s cyber security offerings, which includes products, software and cyber security consulting.
The ransomware recovery tool will be included with the newest, 6.0 version of Workspaces and Gadsby says it will even backdate and work for older documents once the version is updated.
