Edmonton Ransomware Filtering and Remediation Consulting

Ransomware has been widely adopted by cybercriminals and rogue states, posing a possibly lethal risk to businesses that are victimized. Current variations of ransomware go after all vulnerable resources, including backup, making even partial recovery a long and expensive exercise. Novel variations of ransomware like Ryuk, Maze, Sodinokibi, Netwalker, Phobos, LockBit and Egregor have made the headlines, displacing WannaCry, TeslaCrypt, and CryptoWall in prominence, sophistication, and destructive impact.

Most crypto-ransomware penetrations are caused by innocuous-seeming emails with malicious links or file attachments, and many are so-called "zero-day" strains that can escape detection by legacy signature-matching antivirus filters. While user education and up-front identification are important to protect against ransomware attacks, best practices dictate that you take for granted some malware will eventually succeed and that you deploy a solid backup solution that enables you to repair the damage rapidly with little if any damage.

Progent's ProSight Ransomware Vulnerability Checkup is an ultra-affordable service built around a remote discussion with a Progent security consultant skilled in ransomware protection and repair. In the course of this assessment Progent will collaborate directly with your Edmonton network managers to collect critical data about your security configuration and backup environment. Progent will utilize this information to generate a Basic Security and Best Practices Assessment documenting how to apply best practices for configuring and administering your security and backup systems to block or recover from a ransomware assault.

Progent's Basic Security and Best Practices Report focuses on key areas related to crypto-ransomware prevention and restoration recovery. The report covers:

Security

• Proper allocation and use of admin accounts
• Appropriate NTFS and SMB permissions
• Optimal firewall settings
• Safe Remote Desktop Protocol access
• Recommend AntiVirus (AV) tools identification and deployment

• Split permission architecture for backup protection
• Protecting key servers including AD
• Geographically dispersed backups with cloud backup to Azure

About Ransomware
Ransomware is a type of malicious software that encrypts or steals a victim's files so they are unusable or are publicized. Crypto-ransomware often locks the victim's computer. To avoid the carnage, the victim is required to send a certain amount of money, typically in the form of a crypto currency like Bitcoin, within a brief time window. It is never certain that delivering the extortion price will restore the damaged files or prevent its exposure to the public. Files can be encrypted or erased throughout a network based on the victim's write permissions, and you cannot reverse engineer the military-grade encryption technologies used on the hostage files. A common ransomware delivery package is tainted email, whereby the target is lured into responding to by means of a social engineering technique called spear phishing. This makes the email message to appear to come from a familiar sender. Another common attack vector is an improperly protected RDP port.

The ransomware variant CryptoLocker ushered in the new age of crypto-ransomware in 2013, and the damage caused by the many versions of ransomware is said to be billions of dollars annually, more than doubling every other year. Famous examples are Locky, and Petya. Recent high-profile variants like Ryuk, Sodinokibi and Cerber are more sophisticated and have caused more havoc than earlier strains. Even if your backup/recovery processes allow you to recover your encrypted data, you can still be threatened by so-called exfiltration, where ransomed data are exposed to the public. Because new versions of ransomware crop up every day, there is no guarantee that conventional signature-based anti-virus filters will block the latest attack. If an attack does appear in an email, it is critical that your users have learned to identify social engineering techniques. Your last line of defense is a sound process for scheduling and keeping remote backups and the use of dependable restoration platforms.

Contact Progent About the ProSight Crypto-Ransomware Vulnerability Testing in Edmonton
For pricing details and to find out more about how Progent's ProSight Ransomware Vulnerability Review can bolster your protection against crypto-ransomware in Edmonton, phone Progent at 800-462-8800 or see Contact Progent.