Veeam, a data protection and ransomware recovery company, has acquired Coveware, a provider of cyber-extortion incident response. This acquisition further strengthens Veeam’s ransomware recovery and first-responder capabilities, enhancing its radical resilience solutions for customers.
After this acquisition, Coveware will continue to operate as it does, providing incident response services to victims of cyber extortion attacks and working proactively with enterprise customers on incident response preparedness.
It will provide fully automated technology running across the client’s operational environment – to perform forensic triage analysis, which assesses any impact, identifies the ransomware (strain, threat actor group, entry point), and helps recover encrypted data from known ransomware groups – though nothing is as safe as secure, clean backups.
The SaaS platform also helps visualise the data and answer critical attack-related questions. Its global team of cyber threat experts has worked with several companies to assess, prevent, and recover from cyber-attacks.
Coveware by Veeam provides access to continuously updated data on ransomware variants, attack vector analysis, attack footprints, and recovery options, enabling better prevention and faster recovery.
“It’s no longer a question of when your organization is attacked, but how often. Seventy-six per cent of organizations have been attacked over the past twelve months, and addressing that cyber threat is critical for every enterprise,” said Anand Eswaran, CEO at Veeam.
“It’s critical to ensure data is safe and protected, and when the worst happens, businesses can recover quickly and safely. Coveware is already helping enterprises worldwide improve their defence; if the worst happens, it is helping them recover.”
Veeam’s acquisition of Coveware can help organizations address these gaps. Coveware gives Veeam a more proactive stance toward cyber protection. Combining Veeam’s backup capabilities with Coveware’s encryption-defeating technology should yield faster time-to-detection and faster time-to-recover, minimizing the impact of an attack.
Eswaran added, “Combining those capabilities with Veeam’s data protection and ransomware recovery solutions, which over 450,000 customers use, creates the most complete cyber resilience capabilities available from one source. Veeam now provides enterprise customers with proactive threat intelligence that helps identify any security gaps with forensic triage and decryption, all combined with the capabilities of the market leader.”
Founded in 2018, Coveware has helped thousands of cyber extortion victims and developed industry-leading software and services that enable rapid forensic triage, extortion negotiation and remediation, cryptocurrency settlements and decryption services with a singular goal and outcome – data recovery from ransomware attacks.
Through these incidents, Coveware has gathered data and insights on threat actor patterns that provide Coveware and Veeam with a view of the current threat landscape. These valuable findings are shared with customers to help educate and reduce risks, improve security posture, and ensure rapid recovery.
“Recovering from cyber incidents is extremely difficult,” said Bill Siegel, CEO and co-founder at Coveware by Veeam. “Our goal is to minimise the cost of disruption by providing best-in-class incident response tools and services. The threat intelligence gathered from our incident response work also benefits our proactive large enterprise clients – 41 per cent of which are in the Fortune 500 – reduce their risk and increase their resiliency.”
Veeam will also incorporate elements of Coveware technology into the Veeam Data Platform and through the Veeam Cyber Secure Program, which provides customers with cyber protection and support, including pre-, during and post-support of cyber incidents and a $5 million warranty.
Alex Holdtman, the CTO and co-founder of Coveware by Veeam, further emphasised that “working as part of Veeam brings the distribution of these capabilities to many more customers worldwide, which is an incredibly exciting opportunity for our entire team.”
“Many organizations with data backups still decide to pay the ransom,” said Phil Goodwin, Research Vice President at IDC. Our research shows this is often because the backup did not include the necessary system images for recovery. In cases where the ransom was paid because ‘the data backups were incomplete,’ 58 per cent of respondents said backup system failures contributed to the problem.
A recent IDC survey found that 70 per cent of organizations reported they take days or weeks to recover from ransomware, while the best practice time to recovery is less than 24 hours. Adding Coveware’s technology to Veeam Data Platform and Veeam Cyber Secure Program gives Veeam customers interesting new technology and a range of options for rapid malware detection and recovery.”
