Ransomware Attacks: Prepare, Limit, and Prevent
Ransomware attacks have been a growing concern for businesses of all sizes, and they continue to become more prevalent and sophisticated. These attacks can cripple an organization's systems, causing significant damage to its reputation, finances, and operations. Therefore, it's crucial to prioritize three steps to mitigate the impact of ransomware attacks: prepare, limit, and prevent.
Prepare for the worst-case scenario
It's essential to have a plan in place to recover from a ransomware attack. Expect that an attack will happen at any level of the organization and add it to the risk register as a high-likelihood and high-impact scenario. To limit damage in the worst-case scenario, it's necessary to restore all systems from backups. It's more efficient than trying to recover using low-quality attacker-provided decryption tools after paying to get the key. Keep in mind that paying is an uncertain path. You have no guarantee that the attackers' key will work on all your files, that the tools will work effectively, or the attacker will act in good faith.
Limit the scope of damage
To limit the scope of damage, it's crucial to protect privileged roles, starting with IT admins. Ensure you have strong controls for privileged accounts such as IT admins and other roles with control of business-critical systems. Taking away the attacker's ability to use IT admin accounts as a shortcut to resources will drastically lower the chances that they'll be successful in controlling enough resources to impact your business and demand payment.
Make it harder to get in
Prevent a ransomware attacker from entering your environment, as well as rapidly respond to incidents and remove attacker access before they can steal and encrypt data. Identify and execute quick wins that strengthen security controls to prevent entry and rapidly detect and evict attackers, while implementing a sustained program that helps you stay secure.
To counter the threat of ransomware, it's critical to identify, secure, and be ready to recover high-value assets—whether data or infrastructure—in the likely event of an attack. This requires a sustained effort involving obtaining buy-in from the top level of your organization (like the board) to get IT and security stakeholders working together.
With proper planning, protection, and prevention measures, organizations can limit the damage and quickly recover from a ransomware attack.
At HostedTech, we specialize in using extended detection and response (XDR) technologies like Microsoft 365 Defender, Azure Defender and Azure Sentinel which offer market leading protections against Ransomware and can help you implement these measures to prepare your business to defend against and recovery quickly form ransomware attacks.