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Ransomware : Your Crippling Information Technology Catastrophe
Ransomware has become a too-frequent cyber pandemic that presents an extinction-level danger for businesses of all sizes vulnerable to an attack. Multiple generations of ransomware like the CrySIS, Fusob, Bad Rabbit, SamSam and MongoLock cryptoworms have been running rampant for many years and still inflict havoc. More recent strains of ransomware such as Ryuk, Maze, Sodinokibi, DopplePaymer, Conti or Nephilim, as well as more as yet unnamed malware, not only do encryption of on-line data files but also infiltrate all accessible system protection. Files synchronized to off-site disaster recovery sites can also be ransomed. In a poorly architected system, this can render automatic recovery useless and basically sets the datacenter back to square one.

Getting back services and information following a ransomware attack becomes a sprint against the clock as the targeted organization fights to stop lateral movement and eradicate the crypto-ransomware and to restore business-critical activity. Due to the fact that crypto-ransomware takes time to replicate, penetrations are often sprung on weekends, when successful penetrations tend to take longer to discover. This multiplies the difficulty of rapidly marshalling and coordinating a qualified mitigation team.

Progent provides a range of solutions for securing organizations from crypto-ransomware attacks. These include staff training to help recognize and avoid phishing exploits, ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) for remote monitoring and management, plus setup and configuration of the latest generation security gateways with artificial intelligence technology from SentinelOne to identify and suppress day-zero cyber threats quickly. Progent in addition offers the assistance of veteran ransomware recovery consultants with the track record and commitment to reconstruct a breached system as rapidly as possible.

Progent's Ransomware Restoration Help
Soon after a crypto-ransomware penetration, even paying the ransom demands in cryptocurrency does not ensure that criminal gangs will return the codes to decipher any of your files. Kaspersky Labs determined that 17% of crypto-ransomware victims never restored their data after having sent off the ransom, resulting in increased losses. The gamble is also costly. Ryuk ransoms frequently range from fifteen to forty BTC ($120,000 and $400,000). This is greatly higher than the typical ransomware demands, which ZDNET estimates to be in the range of $13,000. The alternative is to re-install the critical elements of your IT environment. Absent access to full system backups, this requires a wide range of skill sets, professional project management, and the willingness to work non-stop until the recovery project is complete.

For twenty years, Progent has provided expert IT services for businesses in Chattanooga and throughout the U.S. and has achieved Microsoft's Gold Partnership certification in the Datacenter and Cloud Productivity competencies. Progent's pool of subject matter experts includes consultants who have earned high-level certifications in important technologies such as Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, and popular distros of Linux. Progent's cybersecurity engineers have earned internationally-recognized certifications including CISM, CISSP-ISSAP, ISACA CRISC, and SANS GIAC. (See Progent's certifications). Progent also has expertise with financial systems and ERP applications. This breadth of experience gives Progent the skills to quickly ascertain critical systems and integrate the surviving components of your computer network system after a ransomware event and rebuild them into a functioning network.

Progent's ransomware group utilizes powerful project management tools to coordinate the sophisticated recovery process. Progent appreciates the urgency of acting rapidly and in concert with a customer's management and Information Technology staff to assign priority to tasks and to put key applications back on-line as fast as humanly possible.

Client Story: A Successful Ransomware Attack Recovery
A small business escalated to Progent after their network system was crashed by the Ryuk ransomware. Ryuk is believed to have been deployed by Northern Korean state hackers, suspected of using approaches leaked from the U.S. NSA organization. Ryuk goes after specific companies with little or no ability to sustain operational disruption and is among the most lucrative iterations of ransomware malware. Well Known targets include Data Resolution, a California-based data warehousing and cloud computing company, and the Chicago Tribune. Progent's customer is a small manufacturing company located in Chicago with about 500 workers. The Ryuk event had disabled all business operations and manufacturing processes. The majority of the client's backups had been on-line at the time of the intrusion and were damaged. The client was evaluating paying the ransom demand (in excess of $200K) and wishfully thinking for good luck, but ultimately brought in Progent.

Progent worked hand in hand the customer to rapidly understand and prioritize the mission critical applications that needed to be restored in order to resume departmental functions:

• Windows Active Directory
• Microsoft Exchange Email
• MRP System

Within 2 days, Progent was able to recover Active Directory to its pre-intrusion state. Progent then accomplished reinstallations and storage recovery on needed applications. All Exchange Server data and configuration information were intact, which facilitated the restore of Exchange. Progent was also able to locate local OST data files (Microsoft Outlook Offline Data Files) on user desktop computers and laptops to recover email messages. A not too old off-line backup of the customer's financials/MRP software made it possible to restore these required services back available to users. Although a large amount of work needed to be completed to recover fully from the Ryuk attack, core services were returned to operations quickly:

Over the following couple of weeks important milestones in the recovery process were achieved through close cooperation between Progent engineers and the client:

• In-house web applications were restored with no loss of data.
• The MailStore Microsoft Exchange Server exceeding 4 million archived messages was brought online and accessible to users.
• CRM/Customer Orders/Invoicing/Accounts Payable/Accounts Receivables (AR)/Inventory Control modules were completely restored.
• A new Palo Alto 850 firewall was set up and programmed.
• Most of the user PCs were being used by staff.

Conclusion
A potential business-ending disaster was avoided by dedicated professionals, a wide spectrum of subject matter expertise, and close collaboration. Although upon completion of forensics the ransomware attack detailed here could have been identified and blocked with up-to-date cyber security technology and best practices, user and IT administrator education, and well designed incident response procedures for backup and applying software patches, the reality is that state-sponsored cyber criminals from Russia, North Korea and elsewhere are tireless and are not going away. If you do fall victim to a ransomware penetration, remember that Progent's roster of experts has extensive experience in ransomware virus defense, mitigation, and information systems recovery.

To review or download a PDF version of this ransomware incident report, click:
Progent's Ransomware Incident Recovery Case Study Datasheet. (PDF - 282 KB)

Additional Ransomware Protection Services Offered by Progent
Progent offers companies in Chattanooga a portfolio of remote monitoring and security assessment services designed to help you to reduce the threat from ransomware. These services include modern machine learning technology to uncover new variants of ransomware that can get past traditional signature-based security solutions.

• ProSight Active Security Monitoring: Endpoint Protection and Ransomware Defense
  ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) is an endpoint protection (EPP) solution that incorporates SentinelOne's next generation behavior machine learning technology to guard physical and virtual endpoint devices against new malware assaults like ransomware and email phishing, which routinely get by legacy signature-based AV products. ProSight Active Security Monitoring safeguards local and cloud resources and provides a single platform to automate the complete malware attack progression including blocking, detection, mitigation, remediation, and forensics. Top capabilities include single-click rollback with Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service and automatic network-wide immunization against newly discovered attacks. Progent is a SentinelOne Partner, dealer, and integrator. Read more about Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) endpoint protection and ransomware defense.

• ProSight Enhanced Security Protection: Physical and Virtual Endpoint Security and Exchange Email Filtering
  ProSight Enhanced Security Protection managed services offer ultra-affordable multi-layer protection for physical servers and VMs, workstations, smartphones, and Exchange Server. ProSight ESP uses adaptive security and modern behavior analysis for round-the-clock monitoring and responding to cyber assaults from all vectors. ProSight ESP delivers firewall protection, penetration alarms, device control, and web filtering through cutting-edge technologies packaged within a single agent managed from a unified console. Progent's security and virtualization experts can help your business to plan and implement a ProSight ESP environment that meets your company's unique needs and that helps you achieve and demonstrate compliance with government and industry information protection regulations. Progent will help you specify and configure policies that ProSight ESP will enforce, and Progent will monitor your network and respond to alerts that call for immediate action. Progent can also help your company to install and verify a backup and restore system such as ProSight Data Protection Services so you can recover rapidly from a potentially disastrous security attack like ransomware. Read more about Progent's ProSight Enhanced Security Protection (ESP) unified physical and virtual endpoint protection and Exchange email filtering.

• ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS): Backup and Recovery Services
  Progent has worked with leading backup/restore software companies to produce ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS), a portfolio of offerings that provide backup-as-a-service (BaaS). ProSight DPS products manage and monitor your backup processes and enable non-disruptive backup and rapid restoration of critical files, apps, images, plus virtual machines. ProSight DPS helps you recover from data loss caused by equipment breakdown, natural disasters, fire, malware like ransomware, human mistakes, malicious employees, or software bugs. Managed backup services in the ProSight Data Protection Services portfolio include ProSight Altaro VM Backup, ProSight 365 Total Backup (formerly Altaro 365 Backup), ProSight DPS ECHO Backup using Barracuda purpose-built hardware, and ProSight MSP360 Cloud and On-prem Backup. Your Progent service representative can assist you to identify which of these fully managed services are most appropriate for your IT environment.

• ProSight Email Guard: Inbound and Outbound Spam Filtering and Data Leakage Protection
  ProSight Email Guard is Progent's spam filtering service that uses the technology of top information security companies to deliver web-based control and world-class security for all your email traffic. The powerful structure of Progent's Email Guard managed service combines cloud-based filtering with a local security gateway appliance to provide advanced protection against spam, viruses, Dos Attacks, Directory Harvest Attacks (DHAs), and other email-borne malware. The cloud filter serves as a preliminary barricade and keeps most threats from reaching your network firewall. This reduces your vulnerability to external threats and conserves network bandwidth and storage. Email Guard's on-premises gateway appliance adds a further level of analysis for inbound email. For outgoing email, the on-premises gateway offers anti-virus and anti-spam filtering, protection against data leaks, and email encryption. The onsite gateway can also help Exchange Server to monitor and safeguard internal email traffic that originates and ends inside your corporate firewall. For more details, see ProSight Email Guard spam and content filtering.

• ProSight WAN Watch: Infrastructure Management
  ProSight WAN Watch is a network infrastructure monitoring and management service that makes it easy and affordable for small and mid-sized businesses to map, monitor, optimize and troubleshoot their connectivity hardware like routers and switches, firewalls, and load balancers plus servers, client computers and other devices. Using cutting-edge Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) technology, WAN Watch ensures that infrastructure topology maps are always updated, copies and displays the configuration of almost all devices on your network, monitors performance, and sends notices when problems are detected. By automating time-consuming network management processes, WAN Watch can knock hours off common chores such as making network diagrams, reconfiguring your network, locating devices that require important updates, or identifying the cause of performance bottlenecks. Find out more about ProSight WAN Watch network infrastructure management services.

• ProSight LAN Watch: Server and Desktop Remote Monitoring
  ProSight LAN Watch is Progent's server and desktop monitoring service that incorporates state-of-the-art remote monitoring and management (RMM) technology to help keep your IT system operating efficiently by checking the state of vital computers that drive your business network. When ProSight LAN Watch uncovers an issue, an alert is sent automatically to your designated IT staff and your assigned Progent engineering consultant so any looming problems can be addressed before they can impact your network. Find out more details about ProSight LAN Watch server and desktop remote monitoring consulting.

• ProSight Virtual Hosting: Hosted Virtual Machines at Progent's Tier III Data Center
  With ProSight Virtual Hosting service, a small business can have its key servers and applications hosted in a protected Tier III data center on a fast virtual host configured and maintained by Progent's IT support professionals. Under the ProSight Virtual Hosting service model, the client retains ownership of the data, the OS platforms, and the applications. Since the environment is virtualized, it can be ported easily to a different hosting solution without requiring a time-consuming and technically risky configuration process. With ProSight Virtual Hosting, your business is not locked into a single hosting provider. Find out more about ProSight Virtual Hosting services.

• ProSight IT Asset Management: Network Documentation Management
  Progent's ProSight IT Asset Management service is an IT infrastructure documentation management service that allows you to capture, maintain, retrieve and protect data about your IT infrastructure, procedures, applications, and services. You can instantly find passwords or IP addresses and be alerted automatically about impending expirations of SSL certificates or domains. By cleaning up and organizing your IT infrastructure documentation, you can save up to 50% of time wasted trying to find vital information about your network. ProSight IT Asset Management includes a centralized repository for storing and sharing all documents required for managing your network infrastructure like recommended procedures and How-To's. ProSight IT Asset Management also offers a high level of automation for gathering and relating IT data. Whether you're planning enhancements, performing regular maintenance, or reacting to an emergency, ProSight IT Asset Management gets you the information you need as soon as you need it. Learn more about ProSight IT Asset Management service.

• Progent Active Defense Against Ransomware: AI-based Ransomware Detection and Remediation
  Progent's Active Defense Against Ransomware is an endpoint protection managed service that incorporates next generation behavior machine learning tools to defend endpoints and physical and virtual servers against new malware attacks such as ransomware and email phishing, which easily escape legacy signature-matching anti-virus tools. Progent ASM services protect local and cloud resources and offers a unified platform to manage the entire malware attack progression including blocking, detection, containment, cleanup, and post-attack forensics. Top features include single-click rollback with Windows VSS and real-time network-wide immunization against newly discovered attacks. Learn more about Progent's ransomware protection and cleanup services.

• Progent's Outsourced/Shared Help Desk: Call Center Managed Services
  Progent's Call Desk services enable your IT team to offload Support Desk services to Progent or split activity for Service Desk support seamlessly between your in-house support team and Progent's nationwide pool of certified IT support technicians, engineers and subject matter experts. Progent's Shared Service Desk provides a smooth supplement to your internal network support resources. End user interaction with the Help Desk, delivery of support, escalation, ticket creation and updates, performance metrics, and management of the service database are consistent whether incidents are resolved by your corporate network support resources, by Progent, or a mix of the two. Find out more about Progent's outsourced/shared Service Desk services.

• Patch Management: Software/Firmware Update Management Services
  Progent's managed services for software and firmware patch management offer organizations of any size a versatile and cost-effective solution for evaluating, testing, scheduling, applying, and tracking updates to your dynamic information system. In addition to optimizing the protection and functionality of your computer environment, Progent's patch management services free up time for your IT team to concentrate on more strategic projects and activities that deliver maximum business value from your information network. Find out more about Progent's patch management support services.

• ProSight Duo Two-Factor Authentication: Identity Validation, Endpoint Remediation, and Protected Single Sign-on
  Progent's Duo authentication services utilize Cisco's Duo cloud technology to protect against password theft by using two-factor authentication (2FA). Duo enables one-tap identity confirmation on Apple iOS, Google Android, and other out-of-band devices. Using Duo 2FA, whenever you log into a secured online account and enter your password you are requested to verify your identity on a unit that only you have and that is accessed using a different ("out-of-band") network channel. A wide selection of devices can be used for this second means of ID validation including an iPhone or Android or wearable, a hardware token, a landline phone, etc. You may designate multiple verification devices. For details about ProSight Duo identity authentication services, go to Cisco Duo MFA two-factor authentication services for access security.

• ProSight Reporting: Real-time Reporting for Ticketing and Network Monitoring Platforms
  ProSight Reporting is an expanding family of in-depth reporting tools designed to work with the industry's top ticketing and remote network monitoring platforms including ConnectWise Manage, ConnectWise Automate, Customer Thermometer, Auvik, and SentinelOne. ProSight Reporting incorporates Microsoft Graph and features color coding to highlight and contextualize critical issues like spotty support follow-through or endpoints with out-of-date AVs. By exposing ticketing or network health problems concisely and in near-real time, ProSight Reporting enhances productivity, reduces management overhead, and saves money. For details, visit ProSight Reporting for ticketing and network monitoring platforms.