In order to protect valuable data assets and prevent data loss, organizations typically backup their digital data automatically and create backup copies of the data at regular intervals, such as daily, weekly or other intervals deemed sufficient by the owner. The backup copies of the data may be stored at the same location as the primary data, or at a remote site. Generally, the backup copies are maintained for months, before the tape or disk drive, on which the information is stored, is recycled or overwritten.
Existing backup systems, however, are vulnerable to cyberattacks. Cybercriminals, once penetrating the organization's network, are often able to access and compromise the organization's primary data, and potentially the data backup because the backup data is not securely protected during and after the backup process. In addition, it is difficult to detect the compromised data as cyberattacks become more and more sophisticated and the existing systems generally are not designed to detect logical damages to the data. For example, cybercriminals might change the values of an important table in a database. Such damage can remain unnoticed for a long time going beyond the period for maintaining the backup copies. As a result, by the time the logical damage is detected, the backup copies have also been corrupted.