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Ransomware : Your Feared IT Nightmare
Ransomware has become a too-frequent cyber pandemic that represents an existential danger for organizations vulnerable to an attack. Versions of crypto-ransomware like the CryptoLocker, Fusob, Locky, NotPetya and MongoLock cryptoworms have been circulating for many years and still cause harm. More recent versions of crypto-ransomware such as Ryuk, Maze, Sodinokibi, DopplePaymer, Snatch or Egregor, as well as additional unnamed malware, not only do encryption of on-line files but also infiltrate many available system backups. Information synchronized to off-site disaster recovery sites can also be ransomed. In a poorly architected data protection solution, this can render any recovery hopeless and effectively sets the entire system back to zero.

Restoring applications and information following a ransomware attack becomes a sprint against time as the victim tries its best to stop lateral movement and remove the virus and to resume business-critical activity. Due to the fact that ransomware needs time to replicate, penetrations are often launched on weekends, when penetrations tend to take longer to uncover. This compounds the difficulty of rapidly assembling and coordinating a capable mitigation team.

Progent makes available an assortment of services for protecting enterprises from ransomware penetrations. These include user education to help identify and avoid phishing attempts, ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) for remote monitoring and management, along with installation of next-generation security appliances with artificial intelligence capabilities from SentinelOne to detect and disable day-zero threats quickly. Progent in addition can provide the assistance of experienced crypto-ransomware recovery professionals with the skills and commitment to re-deploy a compromised environment as rapidly as possible.

Progent's Crypto-Ransomware Restoration Help
Following a ransomware attack, paying the ransom demands in cryptocurrency does not ensure that merciless criminals will return the needed keys to unencrypt any of your data. Kaspersky estimated that 17% of ransomware victims never restored their information after having paid the ransom, resulting in increased losses. The gamble is also very costly. Ryuk ransoms frequently range from 15-40 BTC ($120,000 and $400,000). This is well above the average ransomware demands, which ZDNET estimates to be in the range of $13,000. The other path is to re-install the key components of your IT environment. Without the availability of essential data backups, this calls for a wide complement of skill sets, top notch team management, and the willingness to work continuously until the job is completed.

For two decades, Progent has made available certified expert Information Technology services for businesses in Vacaville and across the U.S. and has earned Microsoft's Gold Partnership certification in the Datacenter and Cloud Productivity competencies. Progent's group of subject matter experts includes engineers who have attained high-level industry certifications in important technologies including Microsoft, Cisco, VMware, and major distros of Linux. Progent's cybersecurity consultants have earned internationally-recognized industry certifications including CISA, CISSP, ISACA CRISC, and GIAC. (See Progent's certifications). Progent in addition has expertise in accounting and ERP application software. This breadth of experience affords Progent the skills to rapidly understand important systems and re-organize the surviving parts of your network system after a crypto-ransomware penetration and assemble them into a functioning network.

Progent's recovery team utilizes powerful project management tools to coordinate the complex recovery process. Progent knows the urgency of working quickly and in unison with a customer's management and Information Technology resources to prioritize tasks and to put critical applications back on line as fast as possible.

Client Case Study: A Successful Crypto-Ransomware Intrusion Recovery
A business hired Progent after their company was taken over by Ryuk ransomware virus. Ryuk is believed to have been developed by North Korean state sponsored hackers, possibly adopting approaches exposed from the U.S. NSA organization. Ryuk targets specific businesses with little ability to sustain disruption and is one of the most lucrative instances of ransomware viruses. High publicized victims include Data Resolution, a California-based information warehousing and cloud computing business, and the Chicago Tribune. Progent's client is a single-location manufacturing company headquartered in the Chicago metro area and has around 500 workers. The Ryuk event had disabled all business operations and manufacturing processes. Most of the client's backups had been on-line at the beginning of the attack and were eventually encrypted. The client considered paying the ransom demand (exceeding two hundred thousand dollars) and wishfully thinking for the best, but in the end reached out to Progent.

Progent worked together with the customer to quickly understand and prioritize the mission critical services that needed to be restored in order to resume departmental operations:

• Active Directory (AD)
• Email
• Accounting and Manufacturing Software

In less than two days, Progent was able to restore Active Directory to its pre-intrusion state. Progent then assisted with setup and hard drive recovery on mission critical applications. All Exchange ties and configuration information were intact, which greatly helped the rebuild of Exchange. Progent was able to find local OST data files (Outlook Email Offline Folder Files) on team PCs in order to recover mail data. A recent offline backup of the client's manufacturing systems made them able to return these essential programs back available to users. Although a large amount of work needed to be completed to recover fully from the Ryuk damage, essential systems were restored quickly:

During the next couple of weeks critical milestones in the recovery project were made through tight cooperation between Progent team members and the customer:

• Internal web sites were brought back up without losing any data.
• The MailStore Exchange Server with over four million historical emails was brought on-line and available for users.
• CRM/Orders/Invoices/Accounts Payable (AP)/AR/Inventory Control modules were completely recovered.
• A new Palo Alto Networks 850 security appliance was brought online.
• Most of the user workstations were back into operation.

Conclusion
A potential business catastrophe was dodged through the efforts of hard-working professionals, a wide array of technical expertise, and close teamwork. Although upon completion of forensics the crypto-ransomware virus penetration described here would have been blocked with up-to-date cyber security systems and NIST Cybersecurity Framework or ISO/IEC 27001 best practices, team training, and appropriate security procedures for information protection and applying software patches, the fact remains that government-sponsored criminal cyber gangs from China, Russia, North Korea and elsewhere are tireless and represent an ongoing threat. If you do fall victim to a ransomware incident, remember that Progent's team of experts has a proven track record in ransomware virus blocking, removal, and information systems restoration.

To read or download a PDF version of this customer story, click:
Progent's Ransomware Virus Recovery Case Study Datasheet. (PDF - 282 KB)

Additional Ransomware Protection Services Offered by Progent
Progent can provide companies in Vacaville a variety of remote monitoring and security evaluation services to assist you to reduce the threat from ransomware. These services utilize next-generation artificial intelligence capability to detect zero-day variants of ransomware that are able to evade legacy signature-based anti-virus solutions.

• ProSight Active Security Monitoring: Endpoint Protection and Ransomware Defense
  ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) is an endpoint protection service that incorporates SentinelOne's cutting edge behavior machine learning technology to defend physical and virtual endpoints against modern malware assaults like ransomware and email phishing, which routinely evade legacy signature-based anti-virus tools. ProSight ASM protects local and cloud resources and offers a unified platform to address the entire threat progression including filtering, detection, containment, cleanup, and forensics. Top features include single-click rollback with Windows VSS and real-time network-wide immunization against newly discovered threats. Progent is a SentinelOne Partner, dealer, and integrator. Read more about Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) next-generation endpoint protection and ransomware defense.

• ProSight Enhanced Security Protection (ESP): Physical and Virtual Endpoint Protection and Exchange Email Filtering
  ProSight Enhanced Security Protection services offer affordable in-depth security for physical servers and VMs, desktops, smartphones, and Exchange email. ProSight ESP utilizes contextual security and modern behavior analysis for round-the-clock monitoring and responding to cyber assaults from all vectors. ProSight ESP delivers two-way firewall protection, penetration alerts, endpoint management, and web filtering via leading-edge technologies incorporated within one agent accessible from a single console. Progent's data protection and virtualization experts can assist your business to design and configure a ProSight ESP environment that addresses your company's specific requirements and that helps you achieve and demonstrate compliance with legal and industry data protection standards. Progent will help you specify and configure security policies that ProSight ESP will manage, and Progent will monitor your network and react to alerts that require urgent attention. Progent's consultants can also help your company to install and verify a backup and restore system such as ProSight Data Protection Services (DPS) so you can get back in business rapidly from a destructive cyber attack such as ransomware. Read more about Progent's ProSight Enhanced Security Protection (ESP) unified endpoint protection and Exchange email filtering.

• ProSight Data Protection Services: Managed Backup and Recovery Services
  Progent has worked with advanced backup software companies to create ProSight Data Protection Services, a family of subscription-based management offerings that provide backup-as-a-service. ProSight DPS services manage and monitor your backup processes and enable non-disruptive backup and rapid recovery of important files/folders, apps, images, plus virtual machines. ProSight DPS helps your business protect against data loss caused by equipment breakdown, natural disasters, fire, cyber attacks like ransomware, user mistakes, ill-intentioned employees, or software bugs. Managed backup services available in the ProSight Data Protection Services product family include ProSight DPS Altaro VM Backup, ProSight 365 Total Backup (formerly Altaro 365 Backup), ProSight ECHO Backup based on Barracuda dedicated storage, and ProSight MSP360 Hybrid Backup. Your Progent consultant can help you to identify which of these managed services are most appropriate for your network.

• ProSight Email Guard: Inbound and Outbound Spam Filtering and Data Leakage Protection
  ProSight Email Guard is Progent's spam filtering service that uses the infrastructure of leading data security companies to provide web-based management and world-class security for your email traffic. The powerful architecture of Progent's Email Guard managed service integrates cloud-based filtering with a local security gateway device to offer complete defense against spam, viruses, Denial of Service Attacks, Directory Harvest Attacks, and other email-based malware. The cloud filter acts as a first line of defense and keeps most threats from making it to your security perimeter. This reduces your exposure to inbound threats and conserves network bandwidth and storage space. Email Guard's on-premises security gateway device adds a deeper layer of analysis for incoming email. For outbound email, the local gateway offers anti-virus and anti-spam protection, DLP, and email encryption. The onsite gateway can also assist Microsoft Exchange Server to track and safeguard internal email traffic that originates and ends within your corporate firewall. For more information, visit Email Guard spam filtering and data leakage protection.

• ProSight WAN Watch: Network Infrastructure Remote Monitoring and Management
  Progent's ProSight WAN Watch is a network infrastructure management service that makes it easy and affordable for small and mid-sized businesses to map, track, optimize and troubleshoot their networking hardware like switches, firewalls, and wireless controllers plus servers, client computers and other devices. Using state-of-the-art Remote Monitoring and Management technology, WAN Watch ensures that network maps are kept current, captures and manages the configuration information of almost all devices connected to your network, monitors performance, and sends alerts when problems are detected. By automating tedious network management activities, ProSight WAN Watch can cut hours off ordinary chores such as making network diagrams, expanding your network, finding appliances that need critical software patches, or identifying the cause of performance problems. Learn more details about ProSight WAN Watch network infrastructure monitoring and management consulting.

• ProSight LAN Watch: Server and Desktop Remote Monitoring
  ProSight LAN Watch is Progent's server and desktop remote monitoring managed service that incorporates state-of-the-art remote monitoring and management techniques to help keep your IT system running at peak levels by tracking the health of critical computers that power your information system. When ProSight LAN Watch uncovers an issue, an alert is transmitted automatically to your specified IT management staff and your Progent engineering consultant so all looming issues can be resolved before they can impact your network. Learn more about ProSight LAN Watch server and desktop remote monitoring services.

• ProSight Virtual Hosting: Hosted Virtual Machines at Progent's World-class Data Center
  With ProSight Virtual Hosting service, a small or mid-size organization can have its critical servers and applications hosted in a protected Tier III data center on a high-performance virtual host configured and maintained by Progent's IT support experts. With the ProSight Virtual Hosting service model, the customer owns the data, the OS platforms, and the applications. Because the system is virtualized, it can be moved easily to an alternate hardware environment without a time-consuming and technically risky configuration process. With ProSight Virtual Hosting, you are not tied one hosting provider. Learn more details about ProSight Virtual Hosting services.

• ProSight IT Asset Management: Network Documentation Management
  ProSight IT Asset Management service is a cloud-based IT documentation management service that allows you to create, maintain, retrieve and safeguard information related to your IT infrastructure, procedures, applications, and services. You can instantly locate passwords or serial numbers and be warned automatically about upcoming expirations of SSL certificates or warranties. By updating and managing your IT documentation, you can save up to half of time wasted looking for critical information about your network. ProSight IT Asset Management includes a centralized location for storing and collaborating on all documents related to managing your network infrastructure such as standard operating procedures and self-service instructions. ProSight IT Asset Management also supports a high level of automation for gathering and relating IT information. Whether you're making enhancements, doing maintenance, or responding to an emergency, ProSight IT Asset Management gets you the knowledge you require as soon as you need it. Read more about Progent's ProSight IT Asset Management service.

• Active Protection Against Ransomware: AI-based Ransomware Identification and Remediation
  Progent's Active Protection Against Ransomware is an endpoint protection (EPP) solution that utilizes next generation behavior-based machine learning tools to defend endpoints and servers and VMs against modern malware assaults such as ransomware and file-less exploits, which routinely get by legacy signature-matching AV products. Progent Active Security Monitoring services protect on-premises and cloud-based resources and provides a unified platform to manage the complete malware attack progression including protection, infiltration detection, mitigation, remediation, and post-attack forensics. Key capabilities include one-click rollback with Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service and automatic network-wide immunization against new attacks. Read more about Progent's ransomware defense and recovery services.

• Outsourced/Co-managed Help Center: Call Center Managed Services
  Progent's Call Desk managed services allow your IT staff to outsource Support Desk services to Progent or split activity for support services transparently between your internal support staff and Progent's nationwide roster of IT service technicians, engineers and subject matter experts (SMEs). Progent's Shared Service Desk provides a seamless supplement to your core support group. End user access to the Service Desk, provision of support services, problem escalation, trouble ticket generation and tracking, performance measurement, and management of the service database are cohesive regardless of whether incidents are resolved by your in-house support resources, by Progent's team, or a mix of the two. Learn more about Progent's outsourced/shared Help 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 versatile and cost-effective alternative for evaluating, validating, scheduling, applying, and tracking updates to your ever-evolving IT system. Besides maximizing the security and reliability of your IT network, Progent's software/firmware update management services free up time for your in-house IT staff to concentrate on line-of-business initiatives and tasks that derive the highest business value from your information network. Learn more about Progent's software/firmware update management support services.

• ProSight Duo Two-Factor Authentication: Access Security, Endpoint Policy Enforcement, and Secure Single Sign-on (SSO)
  Progent's Duo MFA managed services utilize Cisco's Duo cloud technology to defend against compromised passwords by using two-factor authentication (2FA). Duo supports one-tap identity confirmation with Apple iOS, Android, and other out-of-band devices. Using 2FA, whenever you log into a secured application and enter your password you are requested to confirm your identity on a unit that only you have and that uses a separate network channel. A wide range of out-of-band devices can be used for this added form of authentication including an iPhone or Android or wearable, a hardware/software token, a landline phone, etc. You can register multiple validation devices. To find out more about Duo two-factor identity authentication services, refer to Cisco Duo MFA two-factor authentication services.

• ProSight Reporting: Real-time and In-depth Reporting for Ticketing and Network Monitoring Platforms
  ProSight Reporting is an expanding suite of real-time and in-depth management reporting tools created to integrate with the top ticketing and network monitoring platforms including ConnectWise Manage, ConnectWise Automate, Customer Thermometer, Auvik, and SentinelOne. ProSight Reporting uses Microsoft Graph and features color coding to surface and contextualize critical issues such as spotty support follow-up or machines with missing patches. By identifying ticketing or network health concerns clearly and in near-real time, ProSight Reporting improves network value, reduces management overhead, and saves money. For more information, see ProSight Reporting for ticketing and network monitoring applications.