Technology

Active Protection by Acronis

What is ransomware?

Ransomware is a particularly painful type of malware. Malware is “hostile or intrusive software” that is illegally introduced onto your system for malicious reasons. When ransomware infects your system it blocks access to your data until the payment is delivered to the criminals who are extorting you or your business. It's an illegal threat to your data.

How Acronis Active Protection works

Acronis Active Protection is an advanced ransomware protection technology. Completely compatible with the most common anti-malware solutions, our technology actively protects all of the data on your systems, including documents, media files, programs, and more – even your Acronis Cyber Backup files.

Pattern detection

Acronis Active Protection constantly observes patterns in how data files are being changed on a system. One set of behaviors may be typical and expected. Another set of behaviors may signal a suspect process taking hostile action against files. The Acronis approach looks at these actions and compares them against malicious behavior patterns. This approach can be exceptionally powerful in identifying ransomware attacks, even from ransomware variants that are as-yet unreported.

Allowlist and denylist

Acronis Active Protection is capable of detecting new threats based on already identified patterns as well as learned ones. Results must be adjusted to reduce false positive detection of things that really aren’t ransomware. Acronis Active Protection maintains an allowlist — programs that are allowed and expected to perform certain actions — to prevent authorized activities from being falsely tagged as unauthorized.

Self-defense of backup files

One way that criminals could choose to compromise files would be to attack the backup software itself to corrupt the backup files it creates. To protect against this, Acronis has implemented a robust self-defense mechanism that won’t let criminals disrupt the work of the Acronis application or backup file content. Additionally, Acronis Active Protection monitors the Master Boot Record of Windows-based computers. It won't let any illegitimate changes to be made to prevent you from being able to properly boot your computer.

The same technology Acronis uses to stop ransomware can also prevent cryptocurrency mining malware from hijacking your system resources? To learn about the threat of cryptojacking and how Acronis protects your system, click here

Acronis has turned the world upside down

Businesses today are up against a rising tide of threats. Cybersecurity threats and data espionage are more prevalent than at any other point in our history – contributing to an anticipated $2 billion loss due to ransomware this year. What is scarier is malicious attacks are no longer limited to hackers; Ransomware-as-a-Service kits can be purchased for a mere $39 by anyone with low moral standards and a desire to generate a few dollars. Acronis has turned the world upside down. Not only have they delivered an innovative protection that any size business can easily use, but also an active protection against ransomware attacks with instant recovery of the affected data. This is a game-changing industry first.

Eric O'Neill

Verified Acronis user

Actual recovery of ransomed files

If ransomware begins to encrypt files, Acronis quickly detects and halts this process. Because Acronis is a backup solution, any data that was exposed and encrypted before the process was halted can be recovered from a variety of backup sources. Not only can’t alternative anti-ransomware solutions commonly end an attack once it has started, they have no way to recover any files encrypted by the attack. Acronis Active Protection detects and deflects attacks, and restores files of any size!

Protection from future threats

The methodologies in Acronis Active Protection detect and deflect attacks, and restore in advanced ways. These protection approaches not only stay ahead of the criminals, but they are more innovative and advanced than any other anti-ransomware methodology available. The solution addresses

Local or cloud backups attacks

Attackers that try to infect or compromise local or cloud backups
Harder to notice attacks

Attacks that are smaller and harder to notice, for example changing only a small part of a document or photo deep in your hard drive
Surreptitiously changed files

Attackers coming up with creative new ways to attempt to surreptitiously change your files without your knowledge

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