Virtually Sober

Through my work at Zerto I’ve delivered multiple presentations and webinars on ransomware and how Zerto enables you to recover VMs, files and folders from seconds before the data was encrypted to minimize data loss and avoid having to pay a ransom. One question I’ve often been asked is how do I know what point in time my files were encrypted? And in one recent presentation a customer told me that their user didn’t tell IT until 3 days after the infection had occurred!

This got me thinking on how we could alert on this which led me to evaluate the different ransomware honeypot example scripts available online. These scripts validate a file placed on a user mapped share, where everyone has write permissions, against a gold or witness copy to catch the ransomware infection then perform a set of actions when found. In testing the multiple examples I struggled to find one that coped with the file itself being changed, I.E the extension changing, that ran consistently and none indicated this alert in the Zerto journal so I decided to write an example that did all of this and more. Read more of this post