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Ransomware was one of last year's most serious cybersecurity threats. It grabbed headlines following the WannaCry attack, which affected more than 200,000 computers across 150 countries. Conventional wisdom has long held that a current backup is the best defense against ransomware. Backing up data is important in the war on ransomware, but you may also be able to add an extra layer of protection through what may seem like an unlikely approach: object storage technology. Object storage makes it difficult -- although not impossible -- for ransomware to infect files. Ransomware encryption To appreciate how object storage can protect data from ransomware, you must understand how ransomware works. There are countless ransomware variants in the wild, which means cyberthieves aren't using a standard algorithm to encrypt victims' files. In most cases, a ransomware infection attacks data at the file level, not at the volume level. There are two main reasons for this. First, ransomware runs under the same security context as the end user ...