Augusta-Richmond County Ransomware Prevention and Recovery Solutions

Ransomware has been weaponized by cybercriminals and rogue states, posing a potentially existential threat to businesses that are successfully attacked. The latest variations of crypto-ransomware target all vulnerable resources, including online backup, making even selective restoration a complex and costly exercise. Novel variations of ransomware such as Ryuk, Maze, Sodinokibi, Mailto (aka Netwalker), Phobos, Snatch and Nephilim have made the headlines, replacing WannaCry, TeslaCrypt, and CryptoWall in notoriety, elaborateness, and destructive impact.

90% of ransomware penetrations are the result of innocuous-looking emails that have malicious hyperlinks or file attachments, and many are "zero-day" attacks that can escape detection by legacy signature-based antivirus (AV) filters. Although user education and up-front detection are important to protect your network against ransomware attacks, best practices dictate that you take for granted some malware will inevitably succeed and that you put in place a strong backup solution that permits you to restore files and services rapidly with little if any losses.

Progent's ProSight Ransomware Preparedness Report is a low-cost service built around a remote discussion with a Progent security expert skilled in ransomware protection and recovery. In the course of this interview Progent will work directly with your Augusta-Richmond County network management staff to gather pertinent data about your cybersecurity configuration and backup environment. Progent will utilize this information to produce a Basic Security and Best Practices Report detailing how to follow best practices for implementing and managing your cybersecurity and backup systems to prevent or recover from a ransomware attack.

Progent's Basic Security and Best Practices Report focuses on key areas associated with crypto-ransomware defense and restoration recovery. The review covers:

Security

• Proper allocation and use of administration accounts
• Assigning NTFS and SMB permissions
• Optimal firewall settings
• Safe RDP connections
• Guidance for AntiVirus (AV) filtering identification and deployment

• Split permission model for backup integrity
• Backing up key servers including AD
• Geographically dispersed backups with cloud backup to Azure

About Ransomware
Ransomware is a form of malicious software that encrypts or steals files so they are unusable or are publicized. Ransomware sometimes locks the victim's computer. To avoid the damage, the target is required to send a certain amount of money, typically in the form of a crypto currency like Bitcoin, within a brief period of time. It is not guaranteed that delivering the ransom will recover the damaged data or prevent its exposure to the public. Files can be altered or erased throughout a network depending on the victim's write permissions, and you cannot reverse engineer the strong encryption technologies used on the compromised files. A common ransomware attack vector is spoofed email, in which the victim is lured into responding to by a social engineering exploit called spear phishing. This makes the email message to appear to come from a trusted sender. Another popular vulnerability is a poorly protected RDP port.

The ransomware variant CryptoLocker opened the modern era of ransomware in 2013, and the damage attributed to by different versions of ransomware is said to be billions of dollars annually, more than doubling every two years. Notorious examples are WannaCry, and Petya. Recent headline variants like Ryuk, Sodinokibi and Cerber are more sophisticated and have caused more havoc than earlier strains. Even if your backup/recovery processes enable your business to restore your ransomed data, you can still be threatened by so-called exfiltration, where stolen documents are exposed to the public. Because new variants of ransomware crop up every day, there is no guarantee that traditional signature-based anti-virus tools will detect the latest attack. If threat does appear in an email, it is important that your end users have learned to be aware of phishing tricks. Your last line of protection is a sound process for scheduling and retaining offsite backups and the use of dependable recovery tools.

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