Remote Network Management for Small and Midsize Businesses

Ransomware has become the weapon of choice for the major cyber-crime organizations, posing an existential threat to businesses that fall victim. The latest strains of ransomware target everything, including backup, making even partial recovery a long and expensive process. New variations of ransomware like Ryuk, Hermes, and MongoLock have made the headlines, displacing WannaCry, Locky, and NotPetya in notoriety, elaborateness, and destructive impact.

90% of ransomware infections come from innocent-seeming emails with malicious links or attachments, and many are so-called "zero-day" attacks that can escape detection by traditional signature-based antivirus (AV) tools. While user education and frontline detection are critical to defend against ransomware, best practices dictate that you assume some attacks will succeed and that you put in place a strong backup solution that allows you to recover quickly with minimal damage.

Progent's ProSight Ransomware Preparedness Report is an ultra-affordable service centered around an interview with a Progent security consultant experienced in ransomware defense and recovery. Progent will help determine your company's readiness to block or recover from a ransomware attack. During this interview Progent will work directly with you to gather pertinent information about your security and backup environment. Progent will use this information to produce a written Basic Security and Best Practices Report detailing how to apply best practices for configuring and managing your security and backup systems.

Progent's Basic Security and Best Practices Report focuses on key issues associated with prevention (Security) and recovery (Backups). The review addresses:

Security

• Correct use of administration accounts
• Correct NTFS and SMB permissions
• Optimal firewall settings
• Secure RDP connections
• AntiVirus tools selection and configuration

• Split permission model for backup protection
• Backing up required servers (AD)
• Offsite backups including cloud backup to Azure

About Ransomware
Ransomware is a form of malware that either encrypts files so they are unreadable or deletes them altogether. Ransomware often locks the victim's computer so it is unusable. To reverse the damage, the victim is required to pay a specified amount of money (the ransom), typically via a crypto currency like Bitcoin, within a short time window. There is no guarantee that paying the ransom will result in a recovery. Compromised or deleted files can extend throughout a network depending on the victim's write permissions, and the military-grade encryption algorithm used on the hostage files cannot be broken. The most common ransomware attack vector is spoofed email, which the user is lured into opening by a social engineering technique known as spear phishing. This makes the email look as though it came from a trusted sender.

CryptoLocker opened the modern era of ransomware in 2013, and the damage caused by ransomware variants is estimated at billions of dollars annually, more than doubling every two years. Notorious recent threats include WannaCry/WannaCrypt, Locky, Cerber, NotPetya and Spora. Current high-profile threats like Ryuk, Hermes, and MongoLock are more elaborate and have caused more havoc. Because new variants of ransomware crop up daily, there is no guarantee that conventional signature-matching anit-virus tools will block the latest attack. If an attack does show up in an email, it is critical that your users have been educated to be wary of social engineering tricks. Your last line of defense is a solid scheme for scheduling and retaining offsite backups plus the deployment of reliable recovery tools.

ProSight Managed Services Offered by Progent
Progent's ProSight network management suite is a family of affordable, subscription-based service packages that allow small and mid-size businesses to outsource crucial IT management functions. ProSight services that can help defend against or recover from ransomware attacks include email filtering, next-generation AV based on behavior analysis, automatic isolation of infected computers and immediate inoculation of safe devices, plus cloud-based backup with both granular and whole-site recovery.

• ProSight Active Security Monitoring: Endpoint Protection and Ransomware Defense
  Progent's ProSight Active Security Monitoring (ASM) is an endpoint protection service that incorporates cutting edge behavior machine learning technology to guard physical and virtual endpoint devices against new malware assaults like ransomware and email phishing, which easily get by traditional signature-matching AV tools. ProSight Active Security Monitoring protects local and cloud resources and offers a unified platform to manage the entire malware attack lifecycle including blocking, detection, mitigation, cleanup, and forensics. Key capabilities include one-click rollback with Windows Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) and automatic system-wide immunization against newly discovered threats. 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 Security and Exchange Email Filtering
  ProSight Enhanced Security Protection managed services deliver ultra-affordable multi-layer security for physical servers and virtual machines, workstations, smartphones, and Microsoft Exchange. ProSight ESP uses adaptive security and modern behavior analysis for round-the-clock monitoring and responding to security threats from all vectors. ProSight ESP provides firewall protection, penetration alarms, device control, and web filtering via leading-edge tools packaged within one agent accessible from a unified console. Progent's security and virtualization consultants can assist you to plan and implement a ProSight ESP environment that meets your company's specific needs and that helps you prove compliance with legal and industry data protection regulations. Progent will help you specify and implement security policies that ProSight ESP will manage, and Progent will monitor your IT environment and react to alarms that call for immediate action. Progent's consultants can also assist your company to install and test a backup and restore solution such as ProSight Data Protection Services so you can recover quickly from a destructive security attack like ransomware. Learn more about Progent's ProSight Enhanced Security Protection unified physical and virtual endpoint security and Exchange email filtering.

• ProSight Data Protection Services: Managed Backup and Disaster Recovery
  ProSight Data Protection Services from Progent provide small and mid-sized businesses a low cost end-to-end solution for reliable backup/disaster recovery. For a fixed monthly cost, ProSight DPS automates and monitors your backup processes and allows fast recovery of vital data, applications and virtual machines that have become lost or corrupted as a result of hardware failures, software glitches, natural disasters, human error, or malware attacks such as ransomware. ProSight DPS can help you back up, recover and restore files, folders, applications, system images, as well as Hyper-V and VMware images/. Critical data can be protected on the cloud, to an on-promises storage device, or to both. Progent's cloud backup consultants can deliver world-class support to configure ProSight Data Protection Services to to comply with government and industry regulatory requirements like HIPAA, FINRA, PCI and Safe Harbor and, whenever needed, can help you to restore your critical data. Find out more about ProSight DPS Managed Backup and Recovery.

• ProSight Email Guard: Inbound and Outbound Spam Filtering and Data Leakage Protection
  ProSight Email Guard is Progent's spam filtering service that incorporates the technology of top data security companies to provide centralized control and comprehensive protection for your inbound and outbound email. The powerful structure of Progent's Email Guard integrates cloud-based filtering with a local security gateway device to offer complete defense against spam, viruses, Denial of Service (DoS) Attacks, Directory Harvest Attacks (DHAs), and other email-borne threats. Email Guard's Cloud Protection Layer acts as a preliminary barricade and blocks most threats from making it to your network firewall. This reduces your exposure to external attacks and conserves system bandwidth and storage. Email Guard's onsite security gateway device provides a deeper level of inspection for incoming email. For outgoing email, the onsite gateway offers AV and anti-spam filtering, policy-based Data Loss Prevention, and email encryption. The local security gateway can also help Microsoft Exchange Server to monitor and safeguard internal email traffic that originates and ends inside your corporate firewall. For more information, visit ProSight Email Guard spam filtering and data leakage protection.

• ProSight WAN Watch: Infrastructure Remote Monitoring and Management
  ProSight WAN Watch is a network infrastructure management service that makes it simple and inexpensive for smaller businesses to diagram, monitor, optimize and troubleshoot their connectivity hardware like routers, firewalls, and load balancers plus servers, printers, client computers and other devices. Incorporating cutting-edge Remote Monitoring and Management (RMM) technology, WAN Watch ensures that infrastructure topology diagrams are kept current, captures and manages the configuration information of almost all devices connected to your network, monitors performance, and sends notices when potential issues are detected. By automating time-consuming management and troubleshooting activities, ProSight WAN Watch can cut hours off ordinary tasks like making network diagrams, reconfiguring your network, finding appliances that require critical software patches, or resolving performance bottlenecks. Learn more details about ProSight WAN Watch network infrastructure management consulting.

• ProSight LAN Watch: Server and Desktop Remote Monitoring and Management
  ProSight LAN Watch is Progent’s server and desktop monitoring managed service that uses state-of-the-art remote monitoring and management technology to help keep your network running at peak levels by checking the state of critical computers that power your information system. When ProSight LAN Watch uncovers a problem, an alert is transmitted immediately to your designated IT personnel and your assigned Progent engineering consultant so that any looming issues can be resolved before they have a chance to impact productivity. Find out more details about ProSight LAN Watch server and desktop monitoring services.

• ProSight Virtual Hosting: Hosted VMs at Progent's World-class Data Center
  With ProSight Virtual Hosting service, a small or mid-size organization can have its key servers and apps hosted in a protected fault tolerant data center on a high-performance virtual host set up and maintained by Progent's IT support experts. Under Progent's ProSight Virtual Hosting model, the client retains ownership of the data, the OS platforms, and the apps. Since the system is virtualized, it can be moved easily to a different hosting solution without requiring a lengthy and difficult reinstallation process. With ProSight Virtual Hosting, your business is not locked into one hosting provider. Learn more details 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 makes it easy to create, update, find and protect information related to your IT infrastructure, processes, business apps, and services. You can instantly locate passwords or serial numbers and be alerted automatically about impending expirations of SSL certificates or domains. By updating and managing your IT infrastructure documentation, you can eliminate up to half of time wasted searching for vital information about your network. ProSight IT Asset Management features a centralized repository for storing and sharing all documents related to managing your business network like standard operating procedures (SOPs) and self-service instructions. ProSight IT Asset Management also offers a high level of automation for collecting and relating IT information. Whether you’re planning enhancements, performing regular maintenance, or reacting to an emergency, ProSight IT Asset Management gets you the data you require when you need it. Read more about ProSight IT Asset Management service.

ProSight Network Audits
Progent's ProSight Network Audits offer a fast and affordable way for small and medium-size organizations to get an unbiased assessment of the overall health of their information system. Powered by a selection of the top remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools available, and supervised by Progent's certified group of IT experts, ProSight Network Audits show you how well the configuration of your core infrastructure assets adhere to industry best practices. The Basic and Advanced versions of ProSight Network Audit services are available at a budget-friendly, one-time cost and deliver immediate ROI like a more manageable Active Directory environment. Both versions also come with one year of cutting-edge remote network monitoring and management (RMM). Benefits can include easier network management, better compliance with government and industry security standards, more efficient utilization of IT resources, quicker problem resolution, more reliable backup and recovery, and increased uptime. Read more information about ProSight Network Audits network infrastructure assessment.

Contact Progent to Find Out More about Progent's ProSight Ransomware Preparedness Report Service
For pricing information and to learn more about how Progent's ProSight Ransomware Preparedness Report can reduce your vulnerability to ransomware, call Progent at 800-993-9400 or visit Contact Progent.