Organizations must use Write Once, Read Many technology to keep their data safe from tampering.
As organizations grapple with the realities of the cyber threat landscape, they’re encountering the many ways cyber criminals perpetrate their crimes. In addition to holding data hostage or stealing data, another tactic used by cyber criminals is the so-called “data manipulation” attack. In this scenario, the perpetrator gains access to the data and alters or manipulates it to their advantage. They might do this to, for example, artificially inflate financial data, or to simply create a situation where a data set becomes unusable.
The Write Once, Read Many Solution
In order to combat this type of cybercrime, one of the key types of technology companies are looking at is Write Once, Read Many (WORM) media. With WORM technology, data is indelibly written on removable media such as discs or USB in a way that makes it immutable from change.
This ensures that organizations have a copy of their data that has full integrity. The data is offline and out of the hands of cybercriminals, who typically access data through online channels. And even if a nefarious actor was to get their hands on the physical media, they would not be able to change it.
It’s important to note that not all offline storage solutions are WORM. Some offline storage media allows data to be overwritten or changed, making it vulnerable to manipulation attacks by a nefarious insider. Organizations looking at offline, removable storage as part of their data security should ensure the technology they’re using is truly WORM technology.
WORM as part of a Defense in Layers strategy
WORM technology is an important part of the Defense in Layers strategy we recommend for our clients. The underlying premise of a DIL strategy is that the vast majority of networks are vulnerable to attack and there’s no one tool or solution that’s going to prevent 100 percent of cyber security incidents. Because employees are an organization’s greatest vulnerability, it’s impossible to remove the human factor in cyber security.
A Defense in Layers strategy stacks layers of different protective tools and solutions, including WORM technology, over your most sensitive data to deflect as many types of cybercrime as it can. And it places a pragmatic emphasis on tools that help an organization quickly recover from cyber attacks, which are increasingly inevitable even with multiple layers of defense.
Benefits of WORM technology
Many of the most timely cyber security challenges companies are facing can at least be mitigated by adding WORM technology to your Defense in Layers strategy for recovery:
- Keeping an offline, WORM version of your data can help in getting cyber liability insurance, or in case of attack, proving that you did your due diligence in preventing an incident.
- With an immutable version of your data available in your archive on-premise, you can maintain business continuity by restoring your data to get up and running quickly after a cyber security incident.
- You can deflect the cyber criminals—including insider threats—who are bent on manipulating your data, not just stealing or holding it hostage.
WORM technology is a logical piece of the data security puzzle. By providing organizations with a data security tool that disallows manipulation of data, WORM technology can help companies maintain data integrity even in the midst of the ever-evolving cyber security threat landscape.
Chris Rence, president of Rimage Corp., is an innovation leader and expert in global security data protection.
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