Augusta-Richmond County Ransomware Protection and Cleanup Expertise

Ransomware has been weaponized by cybercriminals and bad-actor governments, representing a possibly existential risk to businesses that are breached. Modern strains of crypto-ransomware go after all vulnerable resources, including online backup, making even selective restoration a long and costly process. New variations of crypto-ransomware such as Ryuk, Maze, Sodinokibi, Mailto (aka Netwalker), DopplePaymer, Conti and Nephilim have made the headlines, displacing WannaCry, TeslaCrypt, and Petya in notoriety, sophistication, and destructive impact.

90% of crypto-ransomware infections are the result of innocuous-looking emails with dangerous links or attachments, and many are "zero-day" strains that elude detection by traditional signature-matching antivirus (AV) filters. While user training and frontline identification are important to defend your network against ransomware, best practices demand that you expect that some malware will inevitably succeed and that you put in place a strong backup solution that allows you to repair the damage rapidly with minimal losses.

Progent's ProSight Ransomware Vulnerability Assessment is an ultra-affordable service centered around a remote discussion with a Progent security expert experienced in ransomware protection and repair. During this interview Progent will collaborate directly with your Augusta-Richmond County IT managers to collect critical information about your cybersecurity posture and backup environment. Progent will use this information to generate a Basic Security and Best Practices Report documenting how to follow leading practices for implementing and managing your cybersecurity and backup solution to prevent or recover from a ransomware assault.

Progent's Basic Security and Best Practices Assessment focuses on key areas associated with crypto-ransomware prevention and restoration recovery. The report addresses:

Security

• Proper use of administration accounts
• Appropriate NTFS (New Technology File System) and SMB (Server Message Block) permissions
• Proper firewall setup
• Secure RDP access
• Guidance for AntiVirus (AV) tools selection and configuration

• Split permission architecture for backup protection
• Backing up required servers such as AD
• Geographically dispersed backups including cloud backup to Microsoft Azure

About Ransomware
Ransomware is a form of malicious software that encrypts or steals files so they cannot be used or are made publicly available. Ransomware sometimes locks the target's computer. To prevent the damage, the victim is asked to pay a certain amount of money (the ransom), typically in the form of a crypto currency like Bitcoin, within a brief period of time. It is never certain that delivering the extortion price will recover the lost files or prevent its publication. Files can be encrypted or erased across a network based on the victim's write permissions, and you cannot solve the military-grade encryption technologies used on the compromised files. A common ransomware delivery package is booby-trapped email, whereby the target is lured into responding to by a social engineering exploit known as spear phishing. This causes the email to appear to come from a trusted sender. Another popular vulnerability is an improperly secured RDP port.

The ransomware variant CryptoLocker ushered in the new age of crypto-ransomware in 2013, and the damage caused by different strains of ransomware is said to be billions of dollars annually, more than doubling every two years. Notorious examples are WannaCry, and Petya. Current headline threats like Ryuk, DoppelPaymer and Cerber are more sophisticated and have wreaked more havoc than older versions. Even if your backup/recovery processes enable you to restore your encrypted data, you can still be threatened by exfiltration, where ransomed data are exposed to the public. Because additional versions of ransomware crop up every day, there is no guarantee that traditional signature-matching anti-virus filters will detect a new malware. If threat does show up in an email, it is important that your users have learned to identify phishing tricks. Your ultimate defense is a solid scheme for scheduling and retaining remote backups and the deployment of reliable restoration platforms.

Ask Progent About the ProSight Crypto-Ransomware Vulnerability Review in Augusta-Richmond County
For pricing information and to learn more about how Progent's ProSight Crypto-Ransomware Readiness Review can enhance your protection against crypto-ransomware in Augusta-Richmond County, call Progent at 800-462-8800 or see Contact Progent.