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Ransomware : Your Crippling IT Nightmare
Ransomware has become an escalating cyber pandemic that presents an existential threat for businesses of all sizes vulnerable to an attack. Different iterations of ransomware like the Reveton, WannaCry, Bad Rabbit, Syskey and MongoLock cryptoworms have been out in the wild for many years and continue to cause havoc. The latest variants of crypto-ransomware like Ryuk, Maze, Sodinokibi, Netwalker, Conti or Nephilim, as well as frequent as yet unnamed viruses, not only do encryption of on-line critical data but also infiltrate any accessible system backups. Files synchronized to the cloud can also be rendered useless. In a poorly designed system, this can render automatic restoration hopeless and basically sets the network back to zero.

Getting back online services and data after a ransomware event becomes a sprint against time as the targeted business fights to stop the spread and eradicate the crypto-ransomware and to restore enterprise-critical activity. Due to the fact that crypto-ransomware needs time to replicate, attacks are frequently launched on weekends and holidays, when penetrations in many cases take more time to notice. This compounds the difficulty of promptly marshalling and organizing a capable mitigation team.

Progent provides a variety of solutions for protecting organizations from ransomware penetrations. These include user training to become familiar with and avoid phishing scams, ProSight Active Security Monitoring for remote monitoring and management, along with installation of modern security solutions with AI technology from SentinelOne to identify and disable zero-day cyber threats automatically. Progent also offers the services of experienced ransomware recovery professionals with the talent and perseverance to re-deploy a compromised network as soon as possible.

Progent's Crypto-Ransomware Recovery Support Services
Subsequent to a crypto-ransomware event, sending the ransom in Bitcoin cryptocurrency does not provide any assurance that distant criminals will respond with the needed codes to unencrypt any or all of your information. Kaspersky Labs determined that 17% of crypto-ransomware victims never restored their files even after having sent off the ransom, resulting in additional losses. The gamble is also very costly. Ryuk ransoms frequently range from fifteen to forty BTC ($120,000 and $400,000). This is well above the usual crypto-ransomware demands, which ZDNET averages to be approximately $13,000. The fallback is to setup from scratch the vital components of your Information Technology environment. Without the availability of complete data backups, this calls for a broad complement of skills, top notch project management, and the ability to work continuously until the job is complete.

For decades, Progent has offered professional IT services for businesses in Charlotte and throughout the U.S. and has earned Microsoft's Partnership certification in the Datacenter and Cloud Productivity competencies. Progent's group of subject matter experts includes consultants who have earned advanced industry certifications in foundation technologies such as Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, and popular distributions of Linux. Progent's cyber security experts have earned internationally-recognized certifications including CISA, CISSP-ISSAP, CRISC, and GIAC. (See Progent's certifications). Progent in addition has experience with accounting and ERP applications. This breadth of expertise provides Progent the skills to rapidly identify necessary systems and organize the remaining components of your Information Technology system following a ransomware attack and rebuild them into a functioning network.

Progent's recovery group has state-of-the-art project management systems to coordinate the complex recovery process. Progent knows the importance of acting quickly and in concert with a customer's management and IT resources to prioritize tasks and to put the most important services back on-line as fast as possible.

Case Study: A Successful Ransomware Attack Recovery
A client contacted Progent after their organization was crashed by the Ryuk crypto-ransomware. Ryuk is thought to have been deployed by Northern Korean state criminal gangs, possibly adopting algorithms leaked from America's National Security Agency. Ryuk attacks specific organizations with little or no tolerance for operational disruption and is one of the most profitable examples of ransomware. Major victims include Data Resolution, a California-based data warehousing and cloud computing business, and the Chicago Tribune. Progent's client is a single-location manufacturing business located in Chicago and has around 500 staff members. The Ryuk attack had paralyzed all company operations and manufacturing processes. Most of the client's information backups had been online at the beginning of the intrusion and were eventually encrypted. The client was evaluating paying the ransom (in excess of two hundred thousand dollars) and hoping for good luck, but ultimately utilized Progent.

Progent worked hand in hand the customer to quickly identify and prioritize the essential areas that had to be restored to make it possible to restart company operations:

• Active Directory
• Electronic Mail
• Accounting and Manufacturing Software

In less than 2 days, Progent was able to recover Active Directory to its pre-intrusion state. Progent then performed rebuilding and storage recovery on the most important servers. All Exchange Server ties and attributes were usable, which greatly helped the rebuild of Exchange. Progent was also able to locate non-encrypted OST files (Microsoft Outlook Off-Line Data Files) on team desktop computers and laptops in order to recover mail information. A not too old offline backup of the client's financials/ERP software made it possible to restore these essential programs back servicing users. Although a large amount of work still had to be done to recover fully from the Ryuk damage, critical systems were returned to operations quickly:

Throughout the following few weeks critical milestones in the restoration project were achieved in tight collaboration between Progent consultants and the client:

• In-house web applications were brought back up with no loss of data.
• The MailStore Microsoft Exchange Server exceeding four million archived messages was spun up and accessible to users.
• CRM/Customer Orders/Invoices/Accounts Payable/Accounts Receivables (AR)/Inventory functions were completely restored.
• A new Palo Alto 850 firewall was brought on-line.
• Most of the user desktops were functioning as before the incident.

Conclusion
A possible business disaster was dodged with results-oriented experts, a wide array of knowledge, and close teamwork. Although in post mortem the crypto-ransomware attack detailed here would have been identified and prevented with up-to-date security solutions and best practices, user training, and appropriate security procedures for data protection and applying software patches, the fact is that government-sponsored cybercriminals from Russia, North Korea and elsewhere are tireless and represent an ongoing threat. If you do fall victim to a ransomware incursion, feel confident that Progent's roster of professionals has a proven track record in ransomware virus defense, remediation, and information systems disaster recovery.

To read or download a PDF version of this customer case study, click:
Progent's Ryuk Incident Recovery Case Study Datasheet. (PDF - 282 KB)

Additional Ransomware Protection Services Available from Progent
Progent offers businesses in Charlotte a variety of online monitoring and security assessment services designed to assist you to reduce your vulnerability to crypto-ransomware. These services include next-generation machine learning capability to uncover zero-day variants of crypto-ransomware that can escape detection by traditional signature-based anti-virus solutions.

• ProSight Active Security Monitoring: Endpoint Protection and Ransomware Defense
  Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring is an endpoint protection (EPP) solution that incorporates SentinelOne's cutting edge behavior-based machine learning technology to defend physical and virtual endpoint devices against new malware assaults such as ransomware and email phishing, which easily escape traditional signature-based anti-virus tools. ProSight ASM protects local and cloud-based resources and offers a unified platform to address the entire malware attack lifecycle including filtering, detection, containment, cleanup, and post-attack forensics. Key features include single-click rollback with Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service and real-time network-wide immunization against new attacks. Progent is a SentinelOne Partner, reseller, and integrator. Learn more about Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) next-generation endpoint protection and ransomware recovery.

• ProSight Enhanced Security Protection (ESP): Endpoint Protection and Microsoft Exchange Filtering
  Progent's ProSight Enhanced Security Protection services offer affordable in-depth protection for physical servers and VMs, desktops, mobile devices, and Exchange Server. ProSight ESP utilizes contextual security and advanced machine learning for continuously monitoring and reacting to security threats from all vectors. ProSight ESP delivers firewall protection, intrusion alarms, device management, and web filtering through cutting-edge tools incorporated within a single agent accessible from a single control. Progent's data protection and virtualization consultants can assist your business to design and configure a ProSight ESP environment that addresses your company's unique requirements and that allows you achieve and demonstrate compliance with legal and industry information security regulations. Progent will assist you specify and implement security policies that ProSight ESP will manage, and Progent will monitor your IT environment and respond to alerts that require immediate action. Progent's consultants can also help your company to set up and verify a backup and disaster recovery system such as ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) so you can recover quickly from a destructive cyber attack like ransomware. Learn more about Progent's ProSight Enhanced Security Protection (ESP) unified endpoint protection and Exchange filtering.

• ProSight Data Protection Services: Managed Backup and Recovery Services
  Progent has partnered with advanced backup/restore technology companies to produce ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS), a selection of management outsourcing plans that provide backup-as-a-service. ProSight DPS products manage and track your data backup operations and allow non-disruptive backup and fast recovery of vital files/folders, applications, images, plus VMs. ProSight DPS lets your business recover from data loss resulting from hardware breakdown, natural calamities, fire, malware such as ransomware, human mistakes, malicious insiders, or application glitches. Managed services in the ProSight DPS portfolio include ProSight DPS Altaro VM Backup, ProSight 365 Total Backup (formerly Altaro 365 Backup), ProSight ECHO Backup using Barracuda dedicated hardware, and ProSight MSP360 Cloud and On-prem Backup. Your Progent consultant can assist you to determine which of these managed backup services are best suited for your network.

• ProSight Email Guard: Inbound and Outbound Spam Filtering and Data Leakage Protection
  ProSight Email Guard is Progent's spam filtering and email encryption service that incorporates the technology of leading information security companies to deliver web-based management and comprehensive security for your inbound and outbound email. The hybrid architecture of Email Guard managed service combines cloud-based filtering with an on-premises gateway appliance to provide complete protection against spam, viruses, Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks, Directory Harvest Attacks, and other email-based malware. The Cloud Protection Layer acts as a preliminary barricade and blocks most threats from reaching your network firewall. This decreases your exposure to inbound threats and conserves system bandwidth and storage space. Email Guard's onsite security gateway device provides a deeper level of inspection for inbound email. For outbound email, the local gateway offers anti-virus and anti-spam protection, DLP, and email encryption. The local security gateway can also help Microsoft Exchange Server to track and safeguard internal email traffic that originates and ends within your security perimeter. For more information, visit 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 inexpensive for small and mid-sized organizations to map out, monitor, enhance and troubleshoot their connectivity hardware like routers and switches, firewalls, and wireless controllers plus servers, printers, client computers and other devices. Using state-of-the-art RMM technology, ProSight WAN Watch ensures that infrastructure topology diagrams are kept updated, copies and displays the configuration of virtually all devices connected to your network, tracks performance, and generates alerts when problems are discovered. By automating time-consuming network management processes, WAN Watch can knock hours off common chores such as making network diagrams, expanding your network, finding devices that require critical updates, or isolating performance issues. Learn more about ProSight WAN Watch network infrastructure management services.

• ProSight LAN Watch: Server and Desktop Monitoring and Management
  ProSight LAN Watch is Progent's server and desktop remote monitoring managed service that incorporates state-of-the-art remote monitoring and management (RMM) technology to help keep your IT system operating at peak levels by checking the state of vital computers that power your business network. When ProSight LAN Watch uncovers a problem, an alarm is transmitted automatically to your designated IT management personnel and your Progent consultant so all looming issues can be addressed before they have a chance to impact productivity. Learn more details about ProSight LAN Watch server and desktop monitoring consulting.

• ProSight Virtual Hosting: Hosted Virtual Machines at Progent's Tier III Data Center
  With ProSight Virtual Hosting service, a small or mid-size organization can have its key servers and applications hosted in a protected Tier III data center on a fast virtual host configured and managed by Progent's IT support experts. With the ProSight Virtual Hosting model, the customer retains ownership of the data, the OS platforms, and the applications. Since the system is virtualized, it can be ported immediately to a different hardware solution without a lengthy and technically risky configuration procedure. With ProSight Virtual Hosting, your business is not tied 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 a cloud-based IT documentation management service that makes it easy to create, maintain, retrieve and protect data related to your network infrastructure, procedures, business apps, and services. You can quickly locate passwords or serial numbers and be alerted automatically about impending expirations of SSL certificates or warranties. By updating and managing your IT documentation, you can eliminate up to half of time spent looking for critical information about your network. ProSight IT Asset Management includes a centralized location for storing and sharing all documents required for managing your network infrastructure like standard operating procedures and self-service instructions. ProSight IT Asset Management also supports a high level of automation for gathering and associating IT data. Whether you're making improvements, doing regular maintenance, or responding to a crisis, ProSight IT Asset Management gets you the data you need the instant you need it. Read more about ProSight IT Asset Management service.

• Active Protection Against Ransomware: Machine Learning-based Ransomware Detection and Cleanup
  Progent's Active Defense Against Ransomware is an endpoint protection managed service that utilizes cutting edge behavior machine learning technology to defend endpoints as well as physical and virtual servers against modern malware assaults such as ransomware and file-less exploits, which easily escape legacy signature-based anti-virus tools. Progent Active Security Monitoring services safeguard local and cloud-based resources and offers a single platform to address the complete threat progression including protection, identification, mitigation, remediation, and post-attack forensics. Top capabilities include single-click rollback using Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and real-time system-wide immunization against newly discovered attacks. Read more about Progent's ransomware defense and recovery services.

• Progent's Outsourced/Shared Help Desk: Call Center Managed Services
  Progent's Help Center services enable your information technology team to offload Help Desk services to Progent or split responsibilities for Service Desk support seamlessly between your internal network support team and Progent's extensive roster of IT support engineers and subject matter experts. Progent's Co-managed Help Desk Service provides a transparent extension of your corporate support resources. User access to the Help Desk, provision of technical assistance, issue escalation, trouble ticket creation and updates, performance measurement, and maintenance of the support database are consistent regardless of whether incidents are resolved by your core network support resources, by Progent's team, or both. Read more about Progent's outsourced/co-managed Call Desk services.

• Progent's Patch Management: Patch Management Services
  Progent's support services for software and firmware patch management offer organizations of any size a flexible and affordable solution for evaluating, validating, scheduling, implementing, and tracking updates to your dynamic IT system. Besides optimizing the security and reliability of your IT network, Progent's software/firmware update management services permit your in-house IT staff to focus on line-of-business initiatives and tasks that derive the highest business value from your information network. Read more about Progent's software/firmware update management services.

• ProSight Duo Multi-Factor Authentication: Access Security, Endpoint Policy Enforcement, and Secure Single Sign-on
  Progent's Duo authentication service plans incorporate Cisco's Duo cloud technology to defend against password theft through the use of two-factor authentication. Duo enables one-tap identity verification on Apple iOS, Google Android, and other out-of-band devices. With Duo 2FA, when you log into a secured application and give your password you are asked to confirm who you are on a unit that only you have and that uses a separate network channel. A wide range of devices can be utilized for this second means of authentication including an iPhone or Android or watch, a hardware token, a landline telephone, etc. You can designate multiple verification devices. To learn more about Duo identity authentication services, go to Cisco Duo MFA two-factor authentication (2FA) services.

• ProSight Reporting: Real-time Reporting for Ticketing and Network Monitoring Platforms
  ProSight Reporting is an expanding family of in-depth reporting utilities created to work with the industry's leading ticketing and remote network monitoring programs such as ConnectWise Manage, ConnectWise Automate, Customer Thermometer, Auvik, and SentinelOne. ProSight Reporting uses Microsoft Graph and features color coding to surface and contextualize key issues like spotty support follow-up or machines with missing patches. By exposing ticketing or network health problems concisely and in near-real time, ProSight Reporting enhances network value, reduces management overhead, and saves money. For more information, see ProSight Reporting for ticketing and network monitoring applications.