Why Backup Infrastructure Needs Active Defense

Backup infrastructure is a prime target for attackers. Whether you’re an MSP managing multiple environments or an internal IT team safeguarding your own, the risk of brute force attacks on backup systems is real and growing.

Here’s how honeypot technology can help alert teams to cyberattacks on the backup infrastructure so they can proactively defend their backup environments and ensure recoverability – even when attackers aim to corrupt the very systems designed to protect your data.

Network Infiltration Scenario

Picture an attacker who has infiltrated your network and is seeking to maximize damage by conducting a brute force attack on your backup infrastructure (i.e. where your backups are stored, either a cloud storage environment or local appliance). They then make backup copies non-recoverable by corrupting the filesystem / storage, becoming a catastrophic scenario.

Traditional on-prem backup solutions put the onus on you to secure backup infrastructure. That means manually hardening the backup servers by isolating the backup network, regularly patching vulnerabilities, and so on. Manual hardening is possible, but it leaves room for manual errors and potential gaps which are then exploited by cybercriminals.

How Anomaly Detection Helps

Anomaly Detection acts as an intelligent guard for your backup infrastructure:

Honeypots: An always-on defense mechanism that is designed to detect brute force attacks on backup infrastructure by identifying unauthorized access attempts from bad actors. In backup infrastructure, a honeypot might be a dummy backup set; if someone tries to corrupt it, you know there’s a bad actor. Anomaly Detection watches these tripwires and is alerted when they’re set off.

Anomaly Detection Remediation Method

Once Anomaly Detection detects a brute force attack via honeypots, users should conduct a forensic analysis and clean up the environment with an MDR/EDR solution, then restore from immutable copies. Cove employs always-on, immutable copies by default (Fortified Copies). These backups are stored as fully isolated, read-only copies that even an admin cannot alter or delete. Meaning even if attackers gain access, they can’t change these copies.

In essence, Anomaly Detection is always vigilant, providing notice during or after an attack on your backup infrastructure. From a data-resilience standpoint, protecting the backup infrastructure means your backups will be there when you need them. That way when disasters happen, you can rely on your last line of defense to recover swiftly, reliably, and securely.

Conclusion

For MSPs and IT teams alike, protecting backup infrastructure helps to ensure continuity. With Cove Data Protection’s built-in Anomaly Detection and Fortified Copies, you gain more than just alerts; you gain confidence that clean backups will be there when you need them most. By embedding intelligent detection and recovery into your backup strategy, you reduce manual overhead, close security gaps, and strengthen your last line of defense – without adding complexity.

Click here to find out how Cove can help you protect your backups.

Stefan Voss is VP Product Management at N‑able