A number of years ago, Backblaze was targeted and hit with ransomware. Thankfully we isolated the instance to a single machine and customer data was neither at risk nor affected, but we learned a valuable lesson. If hackers had successfully managed to encrypt our data, every business is a target.

Since that day eight years ago, a lot has changed. Ransomware has grown in sophistication. In just the last year, researchers found the average ransomware recovery payments for businesses have more than doubled, rising to $1 billion in 2023. Aside from the increases in dollar amounts, backups are now regularly targeted alongside production data.

In this critical panel discussion, you will hear about how the attackers gained access, how we reacted, what could have been improved, and how we closed some security gaps and created new features to assist with ransomware protection. We will discuss best practices that we implemented internally, the functionality we built into our products, and the key role that Jamf plays in this new heightened security landscape.

Some of you may be wondering about the data we store for our customers. The systems and networks of our business operations and our production operations are independent, with separate access and credentials for each. While having an employee’s computer compromised by ransomware was horribly inconvenient for the employee, Backblaze’s core systems were never at risk.