Acronis has already incorporated ransomware protection into its backup products, and is now planning to release a standalone version of the technology.
Backup specialist Acronis is planning to make its Active Protection technology available to everyone, even if they are using a competitor's backup software, Acronis chief revenue officer Jan-Jaap Jager told iTWire.
Active Protection is an AI-based system for detecting ransomware that is already built into Acronis Backup and Acronis True Image. It works by establishing normal patterns of activity, and then blocks anything abnormal until the user says they trust the software that's behaving suspiciously.
"With that you can have true zero-day protection," explained Jager.
{loadposition stephen08}Traditional anti-malware products are still important, he said, but the emergence of so many strains of ransomware means we need a way to nip attacks in the bud rather than waiting for the ability to detect each new variant.
The free, standalone implementation of Active Protection will be released sometime in the next two months, Jager said.
A characteristic of the Active Protection feature of the Acronis backup products is that if ransomware manages to encrypt any files before being blocked, they are restored from the most recent backup. Similarly, any other files altered by the malware (eg, by injecting code into system files) will be restored to their pre-infection state.
It was not clear from his description whether standalone Active Protection will integrate with other vendors' backup software to achieve this, or whether it will be left as an advantage of Acronis Backup and Acronis True Image.
But Jager did say that no other backup vendor has built this type of protection into their software, and pointed out that the integration of anti-ransomware and backup makes life simpler for users: when something goes wrong, "just click on a button... and it restores the original [state]."
It does make sense for Acronis - and other backup vendors, for that matter - to provide ransomware protection at no extra charge. The reason is that cloud backup services usually charge for backup but effectively allow recovery for free, even though there are direct costs to the provider. Significantly reducing the incidence of one of the main reasons for a full recovery will also reduce the provider's operational costs.
Additional functionality built on Active Protection will appear around the middle of the year, Jager told iTWire, but would not be drawn on its nature.