Veeam acquires Coveware to boost its ransomware protection capabilities

Veeam Software announced the acquisition of Coveware, a provider in cyber-extortion incident response.

It brings ransomware recovery and first responder capabilities to further strengthen Veeam’s radical resilience solutions for customers.

Coveware by Veeam will continue to operate as it does today, providing incident response services to victims of cyber extortion attacks as well as working proactively with enterprise customers on incident response preparedness.

Since its founding 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 an unrivaled 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.

Selected Coveware by Veeam capabilities will be incorporated into Veeam offerings including Veeam Data Platform and the Veeam Cyber Secure Program, delivering the insights and capabilities to a broader set of customers.

“It’s no longer a question of when your organization is attacked, but how often. Seventy-six percent 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 across the world improve their defense and if the worst happens, helping them recover. Combining those capabilities with Veeam’s #1 data protection and ransomware recovery solutions, which are used by over 450,000 customers, creates the most complete set of 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,” added Eswaran.

Coveware by Veeam

Coveware by Veeam will continue to be available to customers as a full-featured offering, including:

• Fully automated technology that runs 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 Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) platform helps visualize the data and answer critical questions regarding any attack.
• A global team of cyber threat experts around the world who have worked with many of the world’s largest companies to assess, prevent and recover from cyber-attacks.
• Access to continuously updated data on ransomware variants, attack vector analysis, attack footprints, and recovery options that enable better prevention and faster recovery.

“Recovering from cyber incidents is extremely difficult,” said Bill Siegel, CEO at Coveware by Veeam. “Our goal is to minimize the cost of disruption by providing incident response tools and services. The threat intelligence gathered from our incident response work also benefits our proactive large enterprise clients – 41% of which are in the Fortune 500 – reduce their risk and increase their resiliency.”

CTO of Coveware by Veeam, Alex Holdtman further emphasized that, “working as part of Veeam brings the distribution of these capabilities to many more customers around the world, which is an incredibly exciting opportunity for our entire team.”

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.

“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 necessary system images for recovery. In cases where the ransom was paid because ‘the data backups were incomplete,’ 58% of respondents said backup system failures contributed to the problem.i 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. A recent IDC survey found that 70% of organizations reported they take days or weeks to recover from ransomware,ii 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,” concluded Goodwin.