As cyber-attacks have become order of the day, experts are exploring on how hardware-level security can secure computing devices, as most of the software-based security brings glitches at every point of time.
This is happening at a time there are technology innovations are happening on the data storage technologies, as most of the companies use massive data centers to store various internal and customer information.
To prevent such cyber attacks on companies as well as general users, a team of researchers has now come up with a hardware-level security solution for SSDs that can block ransomware attacks before the attacking malware starts encrypting user data.
The new security solution, named as the SSD Insider++ technology, can be integrated into SSDs at the hardware level. So, the ransomware prevention feature will be built right into the SSD drives and will automatically detect unusual encryption activities that are not user-triggered.
When coming to the technical details of the solution, it can be noted that the SSD Insider++ technology uses the inherent writing and deletion mechanisms in NAND flash to perform its task of preventing ransomware attacks.
It leverages the SSD controller to continuously monitor the activity of the storage drive. The system triggers when any encryption workload is detected that is not initiated by the authorized user. In that case, the firmware prevents the SSD to take any write requests, which in turn suspends the encryption process.
The system then notifies the user about abnormal encryption activities via its companion app. The app also allows users to recover any data that was encrypted before the system stopped ongoing the process.
With SSD Insider++ integrated into future SSDs, users will be protected from malicious ransomware attacks from cybercriminals. And as the security solution is at the hardware level, it would be difficult for hackers to crack it before getting into one’s system.
